


Bruised Egos, Lost Causes (Year Three)

by biodigitaljazz



Series: Improvidence [3]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Awkward First Times, Black-Red Vacillation, Blooming Matespritship, Dream Bubbles, Eventual Sex Scene, F/F, F/M, Failing Moirallegiance, Human/Troll Relationship, Implied (And Failed) Auspisticism, M/M, Maybe Two Of Them, Meteorstuck, Not Totally Canon, Quadrant Confusion, Some Fluffy Crap, Whiny Teenagers, human/troll romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-21
Updated: 2014-02-28
Packaged: 2017-12-30 01:32:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 14
Words: 40,873
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1012426
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/biodigitaljazz/pseuds/biodigitaljazz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Your name is Karkat Vantas.</p><p>And you are the most beautiful and superlative specimen of complete and total relationship failure in the history of everyone and everything.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Yeeeaaah part three. my freaky October schedule is finally starting to wind down a little bit, but updates for this story may come a little slow for a bit. I really like this story and I don't plan on abandoning it, so if you like/read it, just excuse the long pauses in between chapters for awhile. word, thanks.  
> ah, I fixed some of the tags. be aware that this story WILL contain a male/male (human/troll) sex scene (or two...??!?) so if that ain't your cup of tea don't drink it.  
> thanks again for sticking with me! hope you enjoy, you crazy bunch of weirdos. :)
> 
> * * *

Your name is Karkat Vantas.

And you are the most beautiful and superlative specimen of complete and total relationship failure in the history of everyone and everything. Nice job. All congratulations go directly to you.

If you believed in karma, you’d be convinced that all of your sweeps being crude and sharp with pretty much everyone you’ve ever come into direct contact with are coming back around to bite you in the ass right about now. You’ve never had a particularly easy life but you’ve also never experienced a streak of ongoing misfortune for _this_ long before. The worst part is that you honestly can’t blame anyone other than yourself.

So far, you’ve managed to become orphaned, lose pretty much all of your friends, totally screw your chance at a matespritship with someone who _actually_ seemed to genuinely like you, put your only stable, existing quadrant in hot fucking water, and not only ruin your shot at _yet another_ quadrant with someone who’d be the literal PERFECT fit for it but also by proxy manage to ruin what seemed like a great and incredibly beneficial project by taking it on _with_ said perfect quadrant potential.

In short, especially as far as relationships are concerned, you have _so_ fucked yourself over.

And you’re embarrassed, which is just adding insult to injury; you know that Kanaya could probably provide some pretty great advice in a situation like this, but what you just proved to yourself is that you are comparable to _Eridan_ with your quadrants, and that is REALLY not something to brag about. At least that bastard had the fucking bulge sacks to actually pursue his relationships – even though he was way too aggressive and sloppy and desperate about it. You can’t even your one under control.

You have been making an attempt, but it’s pretty safe to say that things won’t be the same. You’re blaming yourself because you’re good at it, though you don’t seem to be getting a whole lot of effort on his behalf anymore, either. You should have seen something like this coming when he first unhinged, but you liked him _so goddamn much_ that you were willing to blind yourself with these false ideas that he was a genuinely good guy at heart, just really messed up because of his addiction and his bloodline. You held onto that until your fingers were raw and bleeding and look what it got you. One little act of simple heroism (if you can even call it that) and suddenly things are changing so quickly that you can’t keep up with them.

You keep trying to visit Gamzee and repair the cracks in your foundation but _damn_ him if he isn’t the most twisted, stubborn fucker you’ve ever known because he is just not receiving you correctly. He used to thrive on your visits, like your company was one of the only little threads of sanity that he had left in him, but apparently you’ve severed your loyalty to him by keeping Dave Strider’s stupid, thick skull intact. What choice did you have? If you didn’t stop him, he actually could have killed Dave, or at the absolute least incapacitated him permanently. You need _everyone_ alive and fully functional right now, no exceptions.

You aren’t going to lie and say that you didn’t have your own selfish reasons behind saving him. You’re infatuated with the moron.

Infatuated and vacillating again.

This is a bad habit that you’re having a really hard time breaking. You understand just as well as any other troll how important keeping your quadrants neat and orderly is, and it really _shouldn’t_ be a hard thing to accomplish. Vacillation is normal for younger trolls, but you’re not THAT young anymore. You’re reaching your sexual peak and you feel like you’re five hundred steps behind everyone else as far as getting your shit together is concerned. You had yourself entirely fooled; you were so certain that Dave Strider was your picture-perfect kismesis only a year or two ago, so absolutely without a doubt _sure_ that you actually DID hate him. Maybe it’s the mutant blood or maybe it’s because you’ve been treated like a goddamn outcast up until you met the trolls who would be in the game with you, but your hatred for him, whether it was genuine or not, died the moment you stepped in front of your moirail’s raised weapon. You went soft, totally unexpectedly.

Despite the words you spit in his face that very night, even, you physically _felt_ the moment you shifted from black into red territory. It scared the shit out of you. You’ve played ping-pong with your feelings for a long time, and not once had you _ever_ felt something careen so hard from one extreme to the other.

It was a lot easier to deal with the Gamzee mess when you and Dave started to focus on the communication experiment. It seemed like he was suddenly all for it, out of nowhere, and while you’d initially been really fucking put off by having to basically act as his tour guide through the Alternian language, and despite how much you kind of WANTED to stay irritated with him, you had to let that bullshit go because he just seemed so actually, genuinely INTO everything. He _wanted_ to know. He _wanted_ to learn and understand. And he wanted _you_ to hold his stupid fleshy clammy hand through the whole thing.

You wound up just fucking swallowing your pride and humouring him. Because you’re a sucker and he was paying a hell of a lot of attention to you and you didn’t want it to stop. 

No matter what you do or feel, though, you’re a troll and that’s that. You’re volatile and capricious and combustive and no amount of attraction to anyone else is going to change that about you. You may have slid pretty easily into the complacency of cooperating with him, but sure enough, Dave was Dave and he got on your nerves and you exploded and it was bad enough for him to explode back. Maybe you were both just fucking stir-crazy and a little rattled from the way things were going with Gamzee, but the damage is done and the fight is over and in the aftermath, at the very core of things, you lost your work partner.

And any chance you had of getting physical attention ever again.

Good work, Vantas.

You’ve played the awkward avoidance game with Dave so many times within the past handful of years that it doesn’t surprise you when he starts doing it again. You try pretty avidly not to approach the vicinity of Can Town because _like fuck_ you’re going to put yourself in the position of catching your kind-of-ex and the stupid human that you’re fucking shamefully falling all over yourself for together, and there have been a few instances where he’s had to flash-step right the fuck away from you at the last minute. At first you were a little offended by it, but you have to admit that you wouldn’t know what to do with yourself if he just started suddenly getting all comfortable with you again.

You feel like it’s probably best to give each other some prolonged breathing room for awhile.

You just don’t realize how prolonged it’s going to be.

 

-  -  -

 

It’s pretty fucking prolonged.

Like about a human year prolonged.

Lucky you.

That’s not to say that the entire year has gone by with complete radio silence, but that almost makes it worse. Once he finally picks up his big boy pants and gets over actively avoiding you like a giant wriggler, he lets himself linger in your presence whenever you happen to be in the same space together. You’re starting to understand how he operates and how he adapts to things; first he avoids, then he tolerates, then he _stares_ (the fucking staring kills you because it only lets you imagine what his eyes look like behind his glasses because you’ve seen them so up close) and then he finally starts talking again.

And the whole process takes… about a year. Hard to calculate precise numbers, but it feels like a relatively accurate estimate. 

A year sounds like it’d be really long, but it goes by way too fucking fast when you lose track of the day or the time. Granted you’ve also been trying to keep yourself busy and distracted, which could lend a hand to the time passing by without you really noticing it. There’s only so much holing yourself up in your room (and worrying Kanaya in the process) or trying to heal the wounds in your relationship with Gamzee can do for you, though, when every time you turn a goddamn corner you run the risk of running directly into the one person you wish you could push right the fuck off the edge of this meteor and forget about forever.

You hate to look weak in front of _anyone_ but looking weak in front of Dave is absolutely out of the fucking question. You have too much pride for that bullshit.

Resorting to other methods of distraction has been easier than you expected, but tedious and boring. You’ve tried fiddling with those stupid fucking walkies (and almost wound up pitching them against a wall out of frustration as a result of every single miserably failed attempt), you’ve devised a physical training routine and tried to stick to it, you’ve buried yourself into a blanket on the sofa in your room and gone back through all of your favourite books… shit, you even tried to fix the fucking husktop one more pathetically fruitless time to see if you could maybe access your saved romcoms again. You don’t stop trying to stay respectfully busy until you realize that things are actually kind of stupid and boring without Dave around.

The first time he actually starts to say more than a few mumbled sentences to you again, it’s unsurprisingly at a very strange and out-of-place time. From what you’ve gathered about the humans and their awkward social traits, it’s customary to strike up random conversations during meals, or during solitary sit-downs with the other party or parties – not when one of the two individuals involved is trying to get to the fucking ablution room.

You almost get there, too, but when you reach for the knob of the door, it resists the turn. It’s uncomfortable having to awkwardly face the one you almost walked in on, so you turn to start back down the hall and wait until whoever was in there first leaves, but before you can get more than four steps away, there’s an audible ‘click’ of the door unlocking behind you. 

You stop and listen to it ease open, just barely turning to look over your shoulder like an embarrassed moron.

He pushes through the door, still drying his hands with a rag. He stops just along the threshold, keeping the door propped, and studies you for a minute from behind his glasses. You stare right back, subconsciously straightening your posture and forcing your expression back into neutrality. You’ll be _fucked_ if you betray the fact that every little nerve is on high alert just from the sight of his stupid fucking face.

That stupid fucking perfectly proportionate face. 

Fuck your life.

You used to have more awkward encounters like this awhile back, before it felt like you may have gotten a little closer, and they never seem to get any easier to stomach. He doesn’t give a shit and it shows – he’ll stare you down for hours without changing his face or saying a word to you and have no issues with it because he’s an unabashedly creepy son of a fuck sometimes and he _knows_ it. Watching people get uncomfortable around him seems to be a thing that he legitimately enjoys.

You try very hard not to give him the satisfaction.

The best way you’ve found to combat this particular maneuver is to be silent and unrelenting until he finally breaks the façade and gets to the damn point. It takes him a little longer than usual, this time; he doesn’t make any moves to initiate anything until long after he’s finished drying his hands and draped the rag over one shoulder, leaning a hip against the doorframe.

You stand your ground.

After what seems like fucking forever he finally shifts to cross his arms over his chest. “You know what I think about when I can’t sleep?”

You say nothing and blink at him.

“A’right, calm down, I’ll tell you. I think about the end of the game.”

Your back stiffens for real this time. You just barely squint your eyes at him. It's only sheer instinct that leads you into thinking _What is he playing at?_ because for him to go on almost a year without any real discussion aside from stilted 'polite' conversational practices (from a human's point of view, at least) and then just unprecedentedly launch into something personal seems really suspicious and weird. And kind of fucking rude, not that you're really one to judge another person's rudeness.

He keeps going when he realizes that you're not going to say anything back.

"Like, at first, all I could think about was what the fuck getting off the meteor was gonna be like, you know? Where are we landing. Wherever it is, will it be inhabitable. Are John and Jade gonna actually be there or is something going to get fucked and throw another wrench at us. Or, hell, is the big fuckin' bad just gonna be there waiting for us and rob us of the satisfaction of setting foot on actual solid ground again."

Guy has a lot of nerve, doesn't he.

"It's just gotten bigger than that. Gets bigger every night." He shifts against the doorframe, assumedly to get more comfortable. "If we win, what happens? Does shit go back to normal, like a giant factory reset? Does the new session just become real life and make us start over from there? What if we gotta regrow our species? Repopulate? Maybe we can all make some sort of fuckin' rad troll-human hybrid or some-"

"Fuck that," you finally intervene; nobody said that your resolve was limitless. "Get to the fucking point."

He hesitates for another beat. He's impossible to read… until his lips thin into a flatter, straighter line.

"What if we DO go back to normal," he goes on. "You guys to your planet, us to ours. Anyone who died, do they come back, like some sort of twisted congratulations for beating the thing? …shit, I got like forty-eight dead me's hanging around in different timelines and universes, what the fuck happens to them, do we all restart on Earth? How the fuck does someone handle that kind of scenario?"

You DO have to admit, that concept is pretty fucked up. You have actively spoken to your future self before, so in a detached kind of way you can see why that would be something to consider.

Not that you're about to admit that, of course.

"I can't decide if everyone coming back to life would better than everyone staying dead."

Now you _do_ squint at him.

"I thought I asked you to get to the fucking point," you snap half-heartedly.

"You did not," he replies, eyebrows appearing over the tops of his glasses. "You TOLD me to get to the fucking point. As punishment for being bossy and rude, I'ma take my time doing that, thanks."

Your expression tightens into a scowl. "Just get on with it and get it over with so you can go back to not fucking talking to me at all for another year."

His mouth twitches. That was a pretty good curveball that just left your bitter, self-righteous hand and you can tell by that one tiny, almost negligible movement that you hit him exactly where you wanted to. You can't say for sure how he's been feeling about the distance that HE fucking voluntarily put between the two of you, but if he's even halfway decent, there'd at least be a LITTLE guilt in there.

You're feeling kind of stabby today. If there is guilt, you want to make sure that's where the knife goes.

After a dragged-out silence on his end, you spread your arms a little. "Nothing to say now? Or is this part of 'taking your time'?"

He takes a breath, sucks audibly on his teeth, and pushes out of his lean to walk toward you, drifting to one side of the hall. "Yeah, you know, not worth it, man." He saunters right around you, shoving his hands into his pockets.

You almost demand to know _Not worth fucking what??_ but instead, you switch tactics with the same offending aforementioned knife, twisting it in a different direction. "You want a good ending, Dave?"

It comes out a lot more sour and cynical than you planned, but it does the trick. He stops and cranes his neck to look at you again. Unreadable as always.

You hold onto that upper hand as tightly as you can fucking manage. "You want the entire world to just fucking up and right itself once everything's over? Yeah. Me too. But since you've been repeatedly asking for my opinion without taking a breath to let me fucking offer you one, here, this is what I think."

He turns his entire body, hands still pocketed. He's intrigued, that much is pretty plain to see even with the patented Strider Blankness fit snugly over the parts of his face that you can see, but you're hoping that somewhere behind those stupid glasses is a pinch of nervousness.

You would _love_ to be the one to make Dave Strider genuinely nervous.

Your arms fold across your chest defiantly. "I think that nothing is going to change. _Nothing_. It's more than just a game, and I know you fucking know that. Even if it IS just a game, and we DO somehow manage to win, it's not going to change the mechanics of what we've done. What we've done-" What _you've_ done, to be more grotesquely accurate, but you don't like to think that way. "-is irreversible. _I_ think that we've fucked ourselves in the face so hard that there's nothing we can do but accept that _if_ , not _when_ , we're finished, we will be stuck exactly where we are, we will have NO home to go back to, no previous life to continue carrying fucking on, and everyone we know and love who died will stay dead, _for good_. No dream-selves, no ghosts, just fucking _gone_."

He actually winces. His jaw tightens visibly. A part of you feels a little sorry. The other part is refreshingly exhilarated.

You stalk toward him, slowly - he makes no movements to get closer or back away, just keeps his feet planted where they are. "But none of that will matter if we don't win at all, because we'll be just as dead as them, anyway. I don't see a _happy ending_ for any of us no matter what fucking direction we go in, but I'd rather live and just get over the fact that almost all of my friends and my Lusus are just big fucking sad memories than be one of the dead ones." You can feel an angry heat rising in your cheeks as you stop only a foot or so away from him. This isn't how you wanted your conversation to go but now that he's drilled a few holes in the dam you're having a hard time plugging them back up. " _My_ opinion is to stop fucking thinking about this kind of shit because you know just as well as I do that all it fucking does is drive you right the hell out of your think pan and you might as well be setting up camp in the fucking vents-" You lift a hand, jab a finger in the direction of the nearest grate. "-with him."

His eyebrows draw together. "Man," he rasps, like he needs to clear his throat. "So this would be why you're so gung-ho about keeping everyone here in one living piece. 'Cause you think that if someone dies, they're gonna stay dead no matter what happens at the end of the game."

You roll your eyes at him. "I hope you're not _just now_ putting that together."

"You should think about investing in some glasses. Maybe with a hint of rose to them."

"I'm not being pessimistic, nook sniffer. I'm being realistic. None of you other idiots have it in you to do it, just diluting yourselves down with these visions of big fucking happy shiny rainbows when it's game over."

He snorts. "You sure know how to turn innocent, curious speculation on its head and draw it into a big deal."

"And _you_ sure need to fucking learn how to communicate better because if this is what you want to throw at me after a year of barely acknowledging my existence, something's actually fucking wrong with you."

And he goes back to standing there, expressionlessly breathing at you. 

It goes on for too long again and just as you're about to shove past him to make a retreat (despite how badly you _really do_ have to use the ablution room), he nods once. "Okay."

You feel your shoulders droop a little and you snap them back up to attention. "Okay?"

"Yeah. Okay. How about this. We meet tomorrow around the same time in the common area and start over. Actual discussion, about something important and not something introspective and depressing."

You're wary. It must show on your face because he leans in a little. 

"Good?"

You narrow your eyes and shrug your shoulders because you're a stubborn fuck. Even though your insides are knotting up against your will. "Whatever. Sure."

He nods again and straightens back up. "Cool." He pauses, then salutes you with two fingers. "A'right. Smell ya."

As he turns to head away from you, you frown and lift your arms to sniff under them. Either your sense of smell has become _seriously_ damaged overnight for absolutely no reason or it's an expression lost on you completely.

You're thinking it's the latter. Maybe. Probably.

… what just happened here?

You groan and turn around, too, walking back down the hall to the door you originally came here for. That was a strange encounter, unexpectedly heated on your part, and you can't correctly place how you feel about it - which only hammers in one very distinct and especially unpleasant fact:

He's still got you fucking hooked.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HAPPY HOLIDAYS. HERE'S AN UPDATE.  
> sorry this took so long, and also sorry that it's full of grouchy exposition. slowly gettin my groove back.  
> this update was brought to you by blue moon beer, the song "do I wanna know?" by arctic monkeys looped over and over and over, the letter S, and viewers like you.
> 
> * * *

Keeping yourself from getting your hopes up turns out to be an exhausting and pathetically fruitless endeavor.

As if you needed another reason to sink further down into the depths of self-pity and self-loathing. There used to be a time when you could have excused the sort of wishful thinking bullshit that you were _so sure_ you dropped after you were old enough to speak intelligibly, but you haven’t been able to swallow that without struggle since just before the humans started their session. Now it’s just sad. Now it’s just pathetic. And can you guess what you’re doing right fucking now? 

Right. Being sad and pathetic.

Of course you remember what happened the last time you felt even the smallest little sliver of optimism about him. It ended poorly. You’d bought into your confidence – a rarity in itself – and you ran with it, but you ran a little too fast and directly into a big fucking hard brick wall called Reality. You committed the worst faux pas in this sort of situation: you _confessed_.

Body language is one thing. You were sure that stirring up a physical fight with him would be enough to push the point across that you were basically hitting on him from the standpoint of a kismesis, but you somehow managed to forget, in your blind self-righteousness of the moment, that you’re still dealing with a human. Any troll would have gotten your hints immediately. Any troll may have even been at least minutely flattered.

But Dave thought you were just fooling around. A stupid human misconception of troll courting rituals. He was going along with something he didn’t understand just for the hell of it, which says a LOT about his personality, but that wasn’t exactly the response you wanted from him. You’re used to putting up with a lot of bullshit, but you still expect encounters with others to be at least _partially_ genuine, worst case scenario.

He didn’t catch on to the physical hints, so you had to spell it out for him. And you confessed. The moment his underdeveloped brain finally clicked everything into place, you were promptly rejected. You still don’t know if it was actually intimidation by the prospect of quadrants, or if he was just letting you down gently in his typically awkward kind of way.

Despite that, you’ve just agreed to launch yourself right back into the uncertainty that is Dave Strider, even after a year of getting along just ‘fine’ without it. And you have been violently convincing your brain to stop defaulting to the word ‘date’ every time you deem to even fucking think about it.

Nothing about it is a ‘date’. That bullshit was snuffed out a long time ago.

The thing _you’re_ bitter about and having a hard time understanding is why, exactly, he would push you away over something that he is apparently openly embracing with Terezi. You try your best not to think about it much because it always makes your blood fucking boil but _really though_ , what the fuck. You certainly have your self-esteem issues (which you are _incredibly_ aware of even without everyone constantly tossing you tiny little helpful reminders) but as far as you’re concerned, Dave has just been downright fucking cowardly about this entire situation.

Here is your current stance on Dave Strider:

He is lazy, self-absorbed, and stubborn with very little foresight into what he’s about to say or do and how it’s going to affect the people he’s saying or doing it to. He’s so wrapped up in trying as hard as he possibly can to be The Cool One, probably because it makes him feel better thinking that _he’s_ the one in control around here when everyone knows good and fucking well that it’s actually _you_ holding everyone together. He can be an asshole and he’s pretty significantly ignorant, not to mention he has his head so far up his own ass that sometimes you’d like nothing more than to punch him in the teeth and tell him how fucking _wrong_ he can be about things because he’s doesn’t believe for a second that it’s even possible. You get that he knows he isn’t _actually_ invincible but God Tier has given him a reckless sense of douchey snobbery and it was that attitude that almost cost him a lot fucking more than his pride with Gamzee. And instead of accepting that he needed his useless human ass saved by someone of an obviously much more survival-adept species with humility, he shacked himself up in your room to stay off of Gamzee’s radar, took over your couch and your books, flat-out rejected your last-ditch effort in seducing him into a quadrant, some quadrant, fuck, _any quadrant_ would have satisfied you at that point, and ended the entire thing by making a move on someone you used to – _still do_ – care a fucking lot about.

Which, on top of everything, makes him inexcusably selfish.

You know that _some_ sort of confrontation is coming about Terezi and while part of you is obviously dreading having to have that conversation, there is another part of you that is actually kind of curiously eager to see what comes of it.

It's actually weird and ironic timing to be thinking about that entire shitshow when you do. You've decided to make a pit stop to the kitchen and scrounge for something equivalent to breakfast, mostly just to give your stomach something to fucking do other than be twisty and nervous just before meeting up with Dave as planned the night before.

On your way there, just ahead of you, you see Terezi pass across the width of the hall from the corner you’d usually turned to visit your stupid ex-moirail into the kitchen area. Nothing about this would seem even remotely unusual, if it wasn’t for her posture. You’ve known (and admired) Terezi long enough to have grown very familiar with the way she typically carries herself. She’s always been of the very _upright_ sort, with her back straight and her chest defiantly out, proud and just and lovely. Even when she’s hunched over, typically when she has the damn cane that she tends to uselessly and unnecessarily cart around, there’s something about her that tells you that while she _looks_ relaxed, she’s just as tightly-wound as she is when she’s at full alert. Might have something to do with one sense being gone and the rest fully heightened – whatever it is, she always seems like a coil ready to snap.

Except for right now.

The way she drags herself listlessly and sluggishly from one end of your line of sight to the other is startlingly abnormal. You feel your face drag deeper and deeper into a frown as you draw closer to the corner she just disappeared behind. 

You round that corner a little quicker than you initially meant to.

She’s not there, and you know why. You try to keep your pace slightly slower than moderately panicked as you cross the kitchen straight into the little side room that she’s transformed into a mess of cans.

By the time you're there and peering around the wall, she's just settling herself in the middle of the makeshift down. The Mayor is also there, toward one of the corners, drawing his eyes from her, to you, back to her, back to you, like he wasn't expecting someone to come in here and fuck up his alone time but like hell he's going to, or even _can_ , do anything about it.

You find your own eyes flicking from her back to his face, from her to him to her, and suddenly the room has become _immensely_ awkward and fucking stupid so you shake yourself free of it and clear your throat a little.

You're looking at her when you do. You see her shoulders hunch up a little, her head turn the slightest bit in your direction.

But she doesn't actually greet you and that freaks you WAY the fuck out.

"Uh," you mumble. "Hey."

"Hey," she replies, and that scratchy voice is way quieter than you're used to.

Your first thoughts are of Dave and if he did something to hurt her and wondering which one of his eyes you're going to slowly pluck out first for it.

"You. Uh." You shuffle. Touch the corner of the wall. Stop touching the corner of the wall. Shuffle again. What the hell are you even supposed to ask her, here? "…you okay?"

You see the corner of her mouth that's exposed to you twitch up a little. "Why wouldn't I be?"

It's an odd answer, really, and an even odder situation to be involved in. She IS outwardly acting strange - that much you can tell foe sure just by observing her very briefly - but her VERBAL mannerisms seem to be normal and intact. She's never seemed to you like the type to put on some sort of mask to hide what she's feeling. Always up-front, always honest. Sometimes to an annoying degree.

What you wouldn't give to be fucking annoyed right now. Being annoyed beats the shit out of being worried, any fucking day.

"I… don't know," you offer her lamely, because you really have no idea how to eloquently and correctly answer that question.

She turns a little more, enough to almost face you dead-on. Instantly you can tell that something is just fucking _up_ with her, but like hell you're going to yank it out of her if she doesn't want to talk about it. Her resolve is like iron. Stronger than you think yours could ever be.

She's still wearing that weird little fucking smirk that you can see clear through and don't believe for a goddamn second. "I'm totally fine, crabby."

You frown, not because of the stupid nickname but because she's probably lying to you.

"Did Dave do something?" you blurt, once again not thinking before you force your gigantically inappropriate mouth gash open, as always, you fucking moron.

Her head twists instinctively to the side a little, and you can just _feel_ her blinking behind her glasses, trying to process what you just belched out at her.

"…no?" she finally replies, and her voice is unabashedly, openly wary. "Dave didn't do anything…? What are you talking about?"

She's good at playing ignorant, you're coming to realize.

"Oh, okay, nevermind," you backpedal frantically, suddenly feeling desperate to hurl yourself head-first OUT of the situation you'd insistently dove into only moments ago. Now you're embarrassed. Now you feel like an asshole. You _always_ do this, pushing your way into the private lives of other people without thinking about the sub sequential consequences. You never consider that you probably actually have no fucking idea what you're talking about. "Um, I'll… leave you to it, then."

Her head stays inclined in your direction as you slowly slink yourself back around the corner. Once you're presumedly off of her proverbial (or literal, who the fuck knows with her) radar, you find yourself only taking a step or two backward before freezing, like you're waiting for her to fucking come after you or something. You should know her better than that, by now.

You wait for only a minute or two before you finally turn, grab the food you came looking for in the first place, and leave. 

You had other plans, anyway.

 

\- - -

 

It only takes five minutes for the reality to set in that your 'other plans' involve Terezi's current matesprit.

It takes _ten_ minutes for the pang of guilt to follow suit.

You have no expectations and you get the feeling that Dave knows that, and that he doesn't, either. You obviously can't tell for sure because you aren't a fucking mindreader, but the two of you have spent the last couple of years ping-ponging back and forth, constantly straddling that _frustrating_ fucking line between just barely tolerating one another's presences and trying to swallow the other's face whole. The past year has been a dry spell in one of those arenas, so to speak, but Dave is a compulsive, spontaneous and therefore entirely unpredictable creature. You've tried to keep your distance and he, his, because there is no fucking telling what you'll do when you're put into a tempting situation together.

You're not sure why you agreed to this so easily in the first place.

…no, that's wrong, you _absolutely_ know why you agreed to it. You just don't want to _admit_ to it.

Dave's invitation had initially struck you as odd and weirdly timed, but you accepted it at the drop of a goddamn hat because at your core, there is honestly nothing you want more than to spend as much 'buddy time' as possible with him. You never thought you'd be one of _those trolls_ , sniffing around with your fucking tongue lolling out of your mouth for anything between a kismesis or (fuck your life) a matesprit, but that's what you feel like even as you're making your way up the short distance between the kitchen and the common room.

You feel like maybe you're early but he's already there, lounging on the sofa with his laptop queued up on the table in front of him. You make no grand or extravagant entrance - you walk in, hesitate at the threshold of the door, and stand there looking at him with cans of food in your hands and, _apparently_ , a very obvious expression of stupid surprise on your face. Because he turns his head in your direction, smirks, and tilts his own head a little. 

And says, "Sup."

And suddenly everything you've been worried about, every stupid paranoia that you've been putting yourself against, is completely gone, diminished, nothing but a fucking ill-formed memory traveling through the space between your ears.

You settle your face into a defiant frown.

"Hey," you respond with inappropriate aggressiveness. 

His smirk turns up a notch. "I wasn't actually sure if you'd come or not."

"How lucky are you, then," you deadpan back, but it's hard to sound uncaring and aloof when you're standing there with a can of food in each hand, what is wrong with you.

"Lucky enough," he responds easily, and slaps the couch cushion beside him. "C'mere man. We got a lot to suss out."

You look at the spot he just touched for maybe a little too long, because he heaves this big sigh like you're taking up a valuable amount of his fucking life by not IMMEDIATELY listening to him. 

"Dude," he says. "just get over here, it's not going to be one of those huge long painful kinds of talks. Look." He gestures his free hand toward his idle laptop. "I'm even gonna fire a movie up while we do it. Nice, short, painless." He raises his eyebrows; his grin never falters. "Cool?"

You squint skeptically at him, but that doesn't stop you from moving forward.

You're almost angry at how quickly you obey him, but there's only so much fight in you today and you have a feeling that you're going to need it for somewhere in his 'talk' that he's preparing for you. The unpredictable hurricane that is Dave Strider isn't exactly something you're totally up to facing one-on-one right now, but it had to happen sooner or later. You _know_ how lax he is about most things. If he specifically suggests a serious discussion and is aware enough of his unspoken commitment to follow through with said discussion the following day, then it HAS to be something serious.

Even though his expression is anything _but_.

He seems pretty pleased with himself as you sit next to him, careful to leave a relatively sizable space between his thigh and yours. He doesn't launch right into it, thankfully - he leans forward to start up his movie while you work at opening one of your cans. Some sort of vegetation, red and slimy and earthy, but edible. You've noticed that the human's vegetables agree with you much better than any of their processed foods. You'd rely more on the troll-friendly options, but unfortunately _you_ diminished a majority of it in the beginning by constantly sneaking it off to the vents.

Ahh, the bitter taste of regret.

You have no idea what movie he's designated as your background noise for your talk, but it's safe to assume that you're likely not going to be interested even in the slightest. How can you focus on dismissible, poorly performed, human-made garbage when you're sitting next to the object of SOME kind of your affection (you still need to finally figure that shit out since you've been so hellbent on procrastinating on it, typical-fucking-you) with the overwhelming weight of the unknown hanging directly over your heads. You know he's involved with Terezi and you've accepted that he is rather vehemently AGAINST the idea of quadrants, so it only makes sense for you to be a little wary about what he's shitting his God Tier pants over talking to you about.

Unfortunately for you, it doesn't look like the actual talking is going to happen for awhile.

And unfortunately for you, you're too much of a fucking coward to boss him into it. If there's one thing you have always hated about him and presently _continue_ to hate about him, it's the ability he has to wordlessly hold all of the cards in any situation with you. Whether he even fucking realizes it or not.

So, instead of kicking his laptop off of the table and demanding that he stop dicking around and start flapping his tooth-beds, you settle grouchily into the couch cushions, train your eyes stubbornly and blankly on his computer's screen, and let things, with _agonizing_ and exaggerated slowness, unravel naturally.

The movie's plot seems simplistic and stupid enough, at first - some kind of security breach at a facility with an unseen creature laying siege on what appears to be a frantically incompetent band of human scientists. Lots of screaming, lots of panic. You try very hard not to outwardly roll your eyes at how predictable this movie is _obviously_ going to be if RIGHT from the start, there is screaming and panic. Shit like this isn't _exciting_ , it's _overdone_. Some subtlety would be nice, for a change, but obviously human media is fucking sweeps behind as far as planning and quality are concerned.

You slide your gaze over to him and raise an unamused eyebrow.

He turns to you, raises his own smarmy eyebrow right back, and jerks his chin in the laptop's direction. "Man you gotta get seriously schooled in patience or something, calm the hell down. Just keep watching, I swear it gets better."

You scoff and look back at the screen. A lesson in patience, he (of all people, the one you've been pointlessly waiting around for) says. 

He obviously doesn't know you very well, does he?

You cross your arms across your chest and suddenly feel very thankful for a distraction.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> trying to churn out as much as I can with work being a little overwhelming - you guys are troopers for sticking with me.  
> also, exciting and awesome thing I forgot to mention last time - this series has some FANART. which is AMAZING. they're both from Small Spaces, Bad Blood and finding them was the happiest thing that's ever happened to me.  
> First: [by paperseverywhere on Tumblr](http://paperseverywhere.tumblr.com/post/68516821039/fic-illustration-sketch-commission-for-erica-for), a commission my girlfriend (the mentioned Erica) surprised me with.  
> Second: [hilariously accurate and awkward scene](http://bluearturtle.tumblr.com/post/65287080067/can-you-not-look-for-a-second-oh-jesus-christ) depicted PERFECTLY.
> 
> speaking of my girlfriend, she recently wrote a really awesome little Alpha-kid ficlet centered around Dirk that people should go read like asap because the characterization is SPOT. ON. - you can find it [here!](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1126001)
> 
> okay, onwards to the continued arguing and sexual tension. as always, feedback is always appreciated and I can be found, poked at, flirted with, etc. on Tumblr over at 'bbbbangarang'. thanks guys!
> 
> * * *

You’d told yourself what to expect before you even entered the room, and yet you’re _still_ having a hard time fully convincing yourself that this isn’t what your gut is telling you it is.

Despite your initial low expectations and scathingly cynical first impression, the movie turns out to be a little more entertaining than you thought it would. There’s no romantic plot or even sub-plot, which is usually enough to have you losing interest relatively quickly, but even without it there’s JUST the right amount of campiness to hold your attention. The film seems less focused on emotional bonds or relationships (save for the protagonist and his slightly estranged sister) and more centered around the trope of being stuck in a sealed and temporarily inescapable environment with a handful of sneaky and destructive creatures that are hellbent on taking the main group out one at a time.

Not your particular cup of sopor, but you can deal with it for now.

You know Dave is keeping a silent and sly eye on you throughout.

Even though you can’t see his eyes, and you aren’t looking directly at him, you can just _tell_. He tries to act so smooth and casual but what he _doesn’t_ realize is that he’s actually really awful at being inconspicuous. And you aren’t totally sure why you’re being ‘secretly’ watched but it’s distracting and it’s making you feel pleasantly uncomfortable. If that even makes sense.

This is not a date.

It’s not a date.

There are multiple occasions when something in the film is totally lost on you – a joke or a gag that you should probably find funny but don’t get the punch line for, a reference that sails clear over your fucking head – and he must have seen this movie a million goddamn times because he always seems to know when they’re coming. He cants his head just slightly in your direction to presumably watch you a little more closely for your reaction. Without even waiting for you to prompt an explanation, he leans in toward you to start explaining it, anyway. And he leans in _close_ , talks more quietly than you’re used to, even though nobody else is in the room to bother by speaking loudly and normally.

But it’s not a date.

He pauses the movie once toward the middle to get up and use the ablution room, and when he comes back the sly little shit is sitting closer to you than he was before. That gap you’d purposely and pointedly left between you is squashed and he leaves you in the painfully awkward position of having your thigh touch his, just a little and only when he shifts a certain (and undoubtedly _intentional_ ) way.

It’s _not_ a date.

Even though you really want it to be.

It’s not.

Because he is Terezi’s matesprit and you are destined to die alone. That’s why.

You’re just gearing up for what’s sure to be the final, big fight scene of the film and part of you is actually pretty interested to see what happens, considering both of the main characters left alive have nestled completely into their protagonist and antagonist roles _and_ they both seem to be infected with the same genetically-mutating virus to make them super-human ( _god_ you have such a fucking lovehate relationship with human films, they’re so bad but sometimes that makes you enjoy them even more). Of course, Dave Strider and his earth-shatteringly piss-poor sense of timing, chooses _then_ to start opening his face-gash. Of course.

“So.” ‘So’. It always starts with a ‘so’. You look away from his laptop screen and at him, watch him shift and half-turn to face you a little better, not even giving the slightest shit about how the movement actually makes your legs touch completely, draping one arm across the back of the couch. He’s trying to look casual. You think he looks like a douchebag. The attractive kind. Which is the worst kind.

“So,” he repeats, and you want to smack him across the face just because. “Are we cool these days?”

You feel one of your eyebrows twitch. “What are you talking about.”

You’re not good at playing dumb. Dave seems to agree, by the way the corner of his mouth slowly curls up.

You sigh, resigning. 

“Didn’t we already have this discussion?” you change tactics tiredly. You need to make a permanent mental note for yourself that trying to fool Dave in the emotional department at this point is a waste of time. Disregarding any hopes of a continuing Thing in the future, you still have a past with him. You feel like there’s no need to lie about anything once you get past a certain point with someone (‘certain point’ being, in this case, the experience of a few really, really good full-on face-crushing makeout sessions with his hands on your hips or him pushing you against your door or you getting the opportunity to get him flat on his back while you crawl over him and oh _there you go again_ , asshole, remember what you told yourself about thinking back on that shit).

Casual as ever, ceaselessly infuriating, that smile grows. “Not entirely. I talked, you screamed, and then we agreed to do this. Same way shit usually goes with us.”

You glower at him. “Don’t even claim to be confused as to why, nubmunch,” you snap back. “You can’t tell me that you don’t deserve to be fucking yelled at sometimes.”

“I think I deserve it a lot of the time, actually,” he agrees amicably. Something about him agreeing with you makes you _so damn angry_ , especially if it has to do with his own stupidity. “Have I ever told you, even once, to stop screaming at me?”

You humour him and think back, sure that there’s been at least ONE occasion. But you can’t think of any. That’s pretty frustrating. After a long pause, you sniff and cross your arms. “What’s your point?”

He waves the hand that isn’t resting on the top of the couch, dangerously close to your shoulder. “None of that had a point, that was just bullshitting.”

“Then find your original point and make it.”

“My reason for hanging out with you today is because I miss doing it, jackass. It’s not neuroscience.”

Well, hell, what in the fuck do you even say to that. You can feel the deflation in the anger on your face and there is literally nothing you can do about it.

After staring uselessly at him for a few seconds, you slump back into the couch and clear your throat.

“You’re really hard to be around,” you confess and while he makes no outward movement, you swear you sense something in him stiffen a little.

“Okay?” he replies, aiming for cool and composed but hitting confused on the way by, instead.

You might as well get this out while you have the open opportunity. Beyond you, the movie’s fight scene is firing into action. Unfortunately for you, you’re a _goddamn sucker_ and when Dave is around, especially right in front of you, touching you in some capacity, showing you his undivided attention, nothing beyond you seems to be worth a shit and a half anymore.

Your breath in is thankfully steady, even as your temper and all of the unpleasant (hurt) feelings you’ve been harboring and gagging on for way too long are knocking at the forefront of your mind, wanting the invitation to explode.

“I really hope you don’t think I’m _that_ stupid. I can tell that you’re playing at something and of course I don’t know what it fucking is because you _suck_ at being successfully subtle. You suck at a LOT of things, actually, Dave, and I am getting really fucking tired of always being CONFUSED like some raging, brainless dumbass around you. I notice things, asshole. I notice things like you only wanting me around _sometimes_ and that just happens to be when shit with Terezi starts seeming a little weird.” Dave DOES stiffen this time, and he withdraws his arm to let his hand rest limply in his lap. “Yeah, that got you, didn’t it? I watch Terezi too, Dave, because she’s my fucking friend. I could have had what you do with her once, and I fucked it up. I’m fine with that, I’m living with it, but I still notice when she starts acting fucking funny. And now she’s acting funny. _Strange_ that you choose NOW to start getting all fucking buddy-buddy skipping through fields of fucking daisies with me. REALLY goddamn strange, isn’t it?”

He frowns deeply enough that you can tell even with his glasses on, but you keep digging anyway, because he stomped his heel down on the dam and broke it. He deserves to deal with the flood.

“I notice other things too, like when you look at me for too long. Or when you word something a certain way. Or when we sit down on the couch and you make our legs touch for _no goddamn reason_.” At this, predictably, his leg moves away from yours. You are both relieved and slightly devastated over the loss of contact. “If you want to do this with Terezi, Dave, by all means you have her fair and square and I won’t fucking kick myself over screwing everything up with you to begin with anymore, done, over, hands wiped clean.” Your voice is getting louder, and you’re genuinely trying to keep it from boiling over but it’s really hard when shit has been bottled up for a little too long. “But you can’t tell me that you don’t approve of quadrants when you know _fucking well_ that Terezi is going to find someone else to fill another one and pretty soon you won’t be able to ignore it anymore. And you can’t deny that you’ve been trying to drop hints that you want the _idea_ of a quadrant but not the relationships themselves. If that’s how you think you can win a fucking troll or two over, think again. You might not agree with our customs and that’s fine, we understand that your brain couldn’t possibly expand to the size of mine just to download, unzip, and compute something as simple as—“ You air-quote here, as mockingly as you can. “—‘ _nonstandard_ ’ romance. Your loss. But I’m telling you right now.”

You lean in towards him, and something is balled up deep in your chest and you’re _awash_ with want like you’ve never felt before, all you want to do right now is push him down, bite him everywhere, pull his hair and make him feel amazing and terrible at the same time, but you’re also too mad and too flustered to let him get _that_ particular upper hand.

“If you hurt her in _any_ way because of this, I swear on the grave of my Lusus that I will fucking tear you apart.”

You lean back again. Instead of getting up and leaving, like you feel like you should or like he’s probably expecting you to, you sit there and you watch him judgmentally and you dare him to come back with something sarcastic or disrespectful.

He seems shellshocked, which is _completely_ new to you.

“Damn,” he finally breathes. “I just wanted to tell you that I miss hangouts and this is what I get in response.”

“You deserved it,” you say back firmly.

He’s quiet for a minute, worrying at the inside of his cheek.

Then, he nods.

“You know? I did.”

You just keep watching him. You want more than that. It was his idea to sit you down and try to wax fucking poetic about missing the friendship that you two were admittedly beginning to form, and you said your damn piece and then some. It’s his turn, the selfish prick.

He sighs, realizing this. Shifts away from you and leans across to the table to pause the movie. Whatever’s been happening on the screen looks bloody and exciting and a part of you sort of wishes you’d just kept watching the movie instead of gutting yourself all over Dave’s fucking lap like that.

“…you really needed to get all that out, didn’t you?” he asks hesitantly once he settles again.

“I hope you’re not serious,” you grit back.

“Fine, Karkat, I get it. You’re mad because you feel like I replaced you with Terezi.”

“The hell do you mean, ‘feel’?” Your anger spikes again, hot and spontaneous. “’ _Feel_ ’? More like you DID, fuckhead.”

Caught off guard a second time, he slowly kicks down the little self-righteous wall he was planning to build up just now because, much like you did earlier, he realizes that trying to get out of an emotionally compromising position by purposely avoiding what he’s _actually_ feeling is just a fucking lost cause.

At least the two of you are on the same page about something.

“Alright, fuck, fine, I’m an asshole and I made a stupid decision and I’m sorry, okay? Is that what you’ve been needing to hear this whole time?”

“Hearing you admit that you fucked up helps,” you reply icily.

He sighs again, and this one is explosive. He runs a hand through his hair and you’re STILL not used to seeing a reflexive move like that from him, it’s disarming and weirdly endearing and the fact that you can do it to him gives you a sick, elating sense of personal victory. 

“Not sure what else you want me to say here, man.”

“I want to hear why you did it.”

You blurt that out without really thinking.

He raises an eyebrow at you. “You seriously want to do this? You wanna have some kind of gay heart-to-heart?”

“No. I want you to be honest about something for a change, would it really fucking kill you to do that?”

You are throwing him through so many loops today, it seems. You’re starting to wonder if anyone else has challenged his shitty attitude to this degree before.

“I…” His voice rasps helplessly and he falters. You, for reasons you _wish_ were unknown but are painfully aware of, feel a rush of arousal pulse through you. The remnants of your black feelings have been extremely hard to shake, and having him forced back against the theoretical wall with nowhere to go but directly _into you_ is not helping.

“I don’t know why I did it,” he admits. His shoulders slump. His head angles down like he’s looking at the hands in his lap; his fingers are twining and weaving around each other directionlessly and you hate yourself for it but you’ve never wanted to kiss him more. “Like I said. I made a decision and maybe it wasn’t the smartest. Or the nicest. I prob’ly should’ve thought everything through better but I was confused about you and the quadrant thing was weird to me and I guess I didn’t put it together that it’s a _troll_ thing, not a you thing. I didn’t think about it because I… just… didn’t. I wasn’t thinking at all. That just happens sometimes.”

He lifts his head again and you can assume he’s looking at you, now.

“I didn’t understand it and it freaked me out. We got into it so fast and it was, like. It was just… a _lot_ all at once. I guess I can’t imagine myself _sharing_ someone, I gotta have them all to myself.”

You open your mouth to say something but he cuts you off.

“Yeah, I know, there’s no difference, Terezi’s gonna find someone else, too. I don’t. I just… don’t know, okay?”

You are _tormenting_ him by making him think about this. It’s _fascinating_.

“I’m fucking greedy and I’ll probably get jealous or something and screw it all up, going down that road. But I went down it anyway, didn’t I?”

You don’t answer him. But you have to look away because he is irresistible when his stony wall is down and you’re seeing exactly what makes him tick. Vulnerability has always made you pretty horribly uncomfortable and now it’s coming to you from someone who is _never fucking vulnerable ever_. You can’t decide how to take it. You want to watch it happen but you almost feel like you’re intruding on what should be something private. How the fuck does he do that?

You both lapse into silence. Even the rustling of his hands wringing together has stopped. Now it’s just slow, quiet breathing from the both of you as you look off in different directions.

“So now what.” you finally speak up.

You feel his hand gingerly place itself on your leg, just above your knee. 

Naturally, you turn to look at him.

He’s closer now – not by too much, but enough so that you can just barely see the ghostly outlines of his eyes behind the lenses of his glasses. You realize, as you watch each other, that while you do find Dave to be careless and stupid a majority of the time and impossible to deal with almost _always_ , he is the one person you’ve met who can make you feel every single fucking emotion across the spectrum in the most meager amount of time. You’re used to feeling volatile, for sure, but you aren’t used to jumping between anger, admiration, endearment, and back to anger so quickly and so violently. You never know exactly where to place your feelings for him, specifically, even though you know for a fact that, despite HOW you’re feeling, you want him _desperately_. He is the _only one_ who does that to you, and that has to mean something, doesn’t it?

You feel his hand travel from where it’s resting up to your thigh. You involuntarily lick your lips and think, _I am so fucking screwed_ over the uncomfortably quickened pace of the pulse in your temples.

He swallows, the movement of his throat captivating you, before he leans in a little. Taking the step that you’re hard-pressed to make, yourself. Making it clear to you that he wants it, that he’s still being honest with you, that this _could_ be Something, if you really, really want it to be.

But he hesitates. He gives you an out. He gives you the chance to gather your wits and your pride and walk away.

You take it.

You take it, regretting every last millimeter of those warm, tempting fingers slipping off of you. You take it, and you leave, because while you do really, really want this to be Something, a foreign combination of fear and distrust has come out of nowhere and taken hold of you so hard that walking away seems like your only safe option right now, regardless of the fact that the one thing you want more than anything else is staring you down and telling you, _Go for it._

If you look back, it’ll fucking hurt. So. You don’t.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ssssoooo I took some artistic liberties with dream bubbles and ghosty possession stuff for this chapter Because I Can and it helps to move everything along. just. just go with it.
> 
> also noteworthy: the next chapter will have what all of you perverts out there have been waiting for.
> 
> enjoy and thanks again, as always, for the comments and kudos! still and always down for pokes and flirts at ‘bbbbangarang.tumblr.com’.
> 
> * * *

There are a lot of things that you’ve done in your lifespan up until now that you could both figuratively and literally kick yourself over. Your relationship with yourself is a strained and peculiar one. While you do carry a significant level of hatred and disappointment for yourself and can barely seem to resist when given the chance to delve head-first into self-deprecation, you also still happen to see yourself as a worthy and formidable leader. It’s a strange balance and you honestly don’t expect anyone to understand it, but it’s worked moderately well for you up until this point.

When it comes to Dave Strider, it’s all frustration all the time. And they’re all different levels of frustration, too, which makes it even worse for you in the long run. You’ve covered the entire spectrum from anger to sexual frustration and this might be the reason why you have been leaning toward black feelings for him. You can tolerate him when he’s being serious, most definitely – hell, you even _like_ him to a certain degree during those rare and wonderful moments. You’re definitely attracted to him on a physical level, oh yes. But when he’s stupid and facetious and teasing you all the goddamn time, not to mention playing around with your emotions like he has no fucking clue what he’s actually doing, you come very close to wanting to kill him.

You just hope that none of his negligence leaks into his relationship with Terezi. As much as you wouldn’t mind being in her position right now (or his, haha, _fuck_ ) you aren’t exactly keen on the idea of him hurting her the way you feel like he might possibly be _maybe_ hurting you. You can take it and you can compartmentalize and make it easy to deal with on a daily basis. Terezi’s a tough and resilient troll, but she also has feelings that can be very easily wounded if the weapon is aimed just so.

You know that making a move on Dave wouldn’t necessarily hurt her. She knows quadrants and she isn’t the one with a lingering, unnecessary intimidation of them. That isn’t the thing holding you back. What’s concerning you right now, despite how badly you want it, is the fact that he is still uncertain, still unsure of how to properly be courted by two trolls at once. As much as his human ignorance enrages you, there’s still a part of your conscience that doesn’t want him to make a mistake and wind up inadvertently hurting you AND Terezi at the same time.

Feelings are complicated. This is why you don’t like them.

This is also why you’ve tried to study them and understand them, but there’s only so much a marathon of rom-coms can really teach you.

After retreating from your not-even-remotely-close-to-a-date with him, you’re stuck with a wildly pumping heart and every single cell in your body urging you to go back, to just fucking envelope him, to give him what he clearly wants and what you want in kind. You have no idea what to do with yourself; you shut the door to your room and you lean back against it, slide down until you’re sitting on the floor. You push your hands up into your hair and try to make sense out of what you just did. While it’s still reasonable that you did it to prevent being trampled all over, you can’t seem to convince yourself that it was worth it. Not over your tainted, madly rushing blood. Not over the pounding of your pulse.

You want to be the vigilant stone in this situation but you’re very rapidly reaching the end of your rope, now, because the close proximity you just found yourself in, close enough to hear him breathe, close enough to clearly see the freckles on his face, feeling the weight and warmth of his hand on your thigh was all just a little too much without any resolution stemming from it. Ripping yourself away from that was _profoundly_ difficult and your punishment is being stuck with the lingering what-if and an _incredibly_ angry sex drive.

Even when you give up fighting it and slide your hand down over the front of your pants, you feel empty. Empty and angry and confused.

 

\- - -

 

Your afterglow is tinged and dirtied with listlessness and exhaustion, so you drag yourself back from the ablution room after cleaning up with heavy, weighted limbs to your room. As far as you’re concerned, you’re done for the day. You’re certain that it is likely not even close to nightfall in any normal circumstance but you’ve been caring less and less about that, lately. Time doesn’t really hold the same importance now as it did before.

Isn’t that just fucking funny, considering the Knight you’re tripping all over yourself for.

You feel like you deserve a rest. After all of that adrenaline, after the, what, 45 minutes you just spent hating yourself for wanting Dave so badly and hating yourself for getting off on it the way you do, you feel like that’s the _least_ you deserve. 

You’re drifting off only seconds after collapsing onto your sofa.

That’s when the dream bubble comes along.

You’re jarred into the false ‘awakeness’ that comes along with dream bubble interaction, but the grogginess of it all feels startlingly real. You sit up, blearily blinking, grinding the back of a hand across your eyes before they finally clear up and settle on the other troll in the room with you.

He’s standing by your work desk as if he’s been patiently waiting for you to be alerted to his presence, arms folded over his thin chest and eyes, these two black gaping holes that admittedly make you a little uncomfortable to look at, staring straight ahead of him, at nothing. You shift to bring your legs over the side of the couch and the rustling has his head canting in your direction. Those black, endless voids are now resting sightlessly on you.

“Jesus, _finally_ ,” he says, ever carrying a little flair of the overdramatic. Nothing has changed. Except his eyes are gone. And so is his lisp. “I was waiting for _something_ to happen.”

“Sollux,” you hear yourself breathe, and the relief that floods through you is unexpected, a little scary.

“What’s up, KK?”

“Fuck, it’s good to see you,” you confess in another rush of air as you stand and walk a few paces toward him. You aren’t even bothering to hide the honesty of that statement in your voice and you don’t even fucking care if he catches it or not.

Of course he does. He’s too damn sharp, even after death. He grins, freakishly wide. “Oh come on, KK, don’t turn this into a bulgefest,” he says easily, simply. “It’s a good thing I can’t see you, the love in your eyes might make me sick.”

“Shut the fuck up, brainache,” you say back and you’re smiling, you’re _smiling_ like the biggest dumbass and you are just as glad that he can’t see you as he claims to be. “The only thing you’d see in my eyes is the utter disgust and disdain of having your creepy dead carcass of air and bones standing around taking up space in my room completely fucking uninvited.”

“Heh.” Sollux shifts, hands pushing into his pockets. “I miss you too, asshole.”

“What are you doing here? Aren’t these bubbles supposed to be specifically mapped for a course or something?”

“I guess so,” Sollux replies, one of his thin shoulders lifting. “I still haven’t figured out all of the mechanics yet but that’s the gist. Is it so wrong to want to see my good buddy KK after so long? Oh, sorry, _listen_ to my good buddy KK, because I can’t see and he never shuts up anyway.”

“That can’t be all,” you quip back. “If that were the case you’d’ve fucking visited me sooner.”

“Very true. I’m _also_ here to check on how big of a shitstain you’re leaving on the reputation of our technology.”

Your smile finally fades.

“What?”

Sollux gestures vaguely behind him to your desktop, where your deconstructed communication project has been lying around unfinished and ignored for months. “This whole mess back here. _Ish_.”

“I’m sorry for not being a tech-savvy as you used to be, nubmunch,” you spit back, falling right back into the same old routine like he was never killed (multiple times) to begin with. “I tried. And then I got distracted and forgot about it.”

“Mm, distracted,” Sollux repeats with knowing disbelief, raising a thin eyebrow a little. 

“The fuck are you, some sort of freaky psychic or something?” Now you’re getting defensive.

“ _Duh_ , KK,” he drawls back like you’re a giant idiot. “After my sight went, all other five senses went completely ballistic.”

“Don’t you mean four?”

Sollux smirks and lifts a hand to tap his own forehead. “Five.”

“Ah.” How stupid of you. “At least _something_ good came out of your whole mess.”

“Right? Jeez.” He turns on his heel and stares without seeing down at your desk. “It pains me to think that you’re disassembling things that you don’t understand, KK, so tell me what the hell I should be looking at right now.”

You frown at him, but are suddenly filled with a glimmer of hope that, maybe, this project CAN get done without having to ask Dave and subject yourself to working in close quarters with him again. This could be your salvation, here, and the end of a project that has been bothering the shit out of you since you started it. You hesitate for a second, then let out a long breath and move forward to his side.

“You should be looking at a fucking mess of bullshit that I don’t understand enough to put together,” you confess guardedly. Sollux scoffs, and you glower sidelong at him. “Don’t be a douchebag, Captor, it’s not like I’ve had any real constructive help with this up until now.”

“Mm, constructive,” Sollux repeats, same tone he used before, and you roll your damn eyes. 

Psychics, right?

“So what do you think, here?” you ask to diffuse the incoming awkwardness.

Sollux thinks for a second, before angling those empty eyesockets in your direction and god _damnit_ it’s fucking unnerving. “You still trust me, don’t you, KK?”

Isn’t it funny, when someone asks that, you suddenly don’t even if you did before? “Yes?” you respond carefully, and Sollux grins wider.

Then, your body starts to feel REALLY weird.

It’s like dreaming while dreaming, when you know that you’re doing something, you can feel your limbs moving and you can tell that YOU are the one actively and physically doing everything but you also feel like you’re watching it from a different perspective. Fortunately, you still have control of your speech, and as you watch, terrified, as your hands suddenly get to work dragging very specific tools out of your toolbox and pulling your husktop closer to you, you can’t help but ask.

“Captor are you _fucking possessing_ me??”

“Shh, KK,” he says in a strained whisper beside you, and you want to look at him but find that while you can speak freely, your eyes are moving entirely against your control and it is the fucking _freakiest_ feeling you have ever had the misfortune of experiencing. “The faster you let me do this the sooner I can let you go.”

“Jesus fuck, Sollux,” you say and goddamnit your voice is shaking a little but come on, it’s pretty fucking scary not having control over yourself.

But also kind of cool, you discover pretty quickly, to watch your hands doing things that your brain doesn’t understand. You watch Sollux, through your own limbs, gently pull your computer apart and go straight for specific parts of the guts, unscrewing them, pulling them, disassembling them and matching them to the pieces that you and Dave recovered from the computer room.

You have no idea what’s going on but you feel like the smartest fucker in the world. Things are swiftly changing from terrifying to exhilarating and by the time Sollux is making your hands combine everything, like _fuck_ you can even describe how, you feel yourself starting to laugh breathlessly like a rusty washer around your lungs just got yanked loose.

You try to pay attention and make mental notes of everything Sollux is doing but it’s impossible to keep up with him. He’s doing this like it’s second nature to him and a little piece of you feels slightly envious that he can do stuff like this and you can’t.

Within the span of only a couple of hours working directly through your body, Sollux finishes both walkies and gets them closed up tightly. You feel like you just got blown through an incredibly long hurricane and the aftermath is creation instead of devastation. You _feel_ it when he lets you go, and the closest thing you can compare it to it letting out a breath after holding it for so long. You lean forward against the desk, your body suddenly feeling very heavy.

“That should do it,” Sollux rasps from beside you, bracing himself on your desk with both hands. You look up at him, thankful to have full control back, and he looks just as tired as he sounds but he’s grinning, wide and proud. “Don’t ever say I never did anything for you, KK.”

You breathe out another laugh. “That was… fucking weird, Sollux.”

“Weird or _awesome_?”

You push away from the desk to slump back in your chair, flexing your hands in front of you experimentally. “Maybe a little awesome.” You glance back up at him. “What are _you_ expecting to gain from this?”

“I already gained something, jerkoff,” he responds. “I got to make something again. I got to spend time with someone and possess them, which is fun. I got to see for awhile again. All that and now you don’t have the sad, pathetic bullshit all over your desk anymore.”

You snort and shake your head, fully realizing how much you _actually_ miss him. “Pompous ass,” you say, but there’s no venom whatsoever in your voice. A rarity, for you. You pause, and then tack on a grudging but still well-meant, “Thank you.”

Sollux waves a hand at you. “Shut up, don’t get sentimental. I’d say let’s test them but you should probably wake up soon.”

“You have to leave, huh?” You can’t help but to feel disappointed.

“I should have probably left an hour ago. These meetings normally don’t last so long. We got pretty lucky this time.”

“Guess we did,” you agree, reluctantly standing. “Uh.” You shrug, because you’re awkward and goodbyes are still hard. “…see you again soon?”

“Oh, pff, yeah, really soon.” That makes you feel better. …until he adds, “And it’s gonna be a doozy when you do.”

You frown. “What does that mean?”

But he only grins and wiggles his fingers at you in a wave. “Happy waking, KK.”

Everything around you suddenly feels like suction, like a fraction of a second of strong wind, and you’re left waking up with a sharp gasp on the couch.

You push up into a sitting position and look around. Sollux is gone, that much you were expecting, but you can spot your finished communication devices still sitting on your desk. You try to remember any details you can about the process of putting them together, but even after the initial haze of just waking up passes, you can’t seem recall really anything.

At least it got done, regardless.

You let out a long breath between puffed cheeks and drop back down onto the cushions.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> there's some NSFW between the sheets stuff happening in this chapter ( _finally_ ) so take that into consideration before reading on, yes?
> 
> * * *

You would really like to experiment with the communication devices and see how they work, but it's a little hard when you're all by yourself.

Makes you kind of wish Sollux had stuck around long enough for dream-you to dream-test these things out with him. You knew you missed him before, sure, but you didn't realize the extent of it until he was gone and then reappearing in front of you out of fucking nowhere. It was nice to have someone to relate to for a goddamn change, considering you're starting to feel like a complete stranger to everyone else. Even Kanaya. Kanaya is, understandably, so wrapped up in her matespritship that you should honestly feel happy for her. Instead, you're a little jealous. Having a matesprit sounds nice. Too bad you're too fucked up to handle even something as simple as a moirailegience. 

…okay, you're not giving yourself enough credit. Having a moirail is harder than a lot of people realize. Especially when your moirail is a fucking murdering psychopath who's appeared to have completely lost touch with reality.

So, after you're fully awake and have accepted that Sollux is gone and probably not coming back for awhile, you start weighing your options. You get the feeling that maybe Terezi would be interested in an experiment like this, but things between the two of you have been… weird, if not nearly non-existent, these days. You don't know the reasoning on her end, exactly, but you recognize that it's a little hard to look at her without imagining Dave's hands on her and what they might feel like, touching with confidence rather than tentative curiosity.

Rose and Kanaya would probably be okay with the experimentation but, as mentioned, they have each other to focus on right now. You COULD probably pull one of them aside to help you out, but when you start to think on that for maybe a little too long, you realize that you'd actually feel REALLY, REALLY awkward even approaching them when they're together.

Gamzee is out of the question.

So is The Mayor, because he doesn't talk.

That leaves only one person, and you really aren't sure how good an idea that would be.

You have, at least, come to mostly complete terms with how you feel about him and the conclusive result is a resounding "FRUSTRATED". This makes you instinctively want to stay away from him for as long as you can because you're a _coward_ sometimes and that's how you deal with things that make you cowardly. You hide from them and hope they go away and just get irritated when they don't because most of the time the things that make you cowardly are living, breathing people. You're intrinsically very selfish in that regard.

In the same vein, though, why the fuck do you need to be intimidated by someone like Dave Strider? What has he done to deserve the pleasure of your negligence? This was a project he also agreed on, once, and as much as it pains you to admit it, he got the entire thing started in the first place. If Sollux didn't run into any hiccups making everything work together harmoniously, Dave obviously got the ball rolling the right way, and at least knew a _little_ bit of what he was doing. HE should be the one testing this bullshit out with you. And HE should be the one helping you sort out a resolution if something goes wrong.

You think on this for awhile. You think on this, and stare at the devices warily, and think on it some more.

In the end, you wind up sweeping them off of your desk and heading for your door, ignoring the anxiety already welling up inside of you and telling yourself, over and over, that he doesn't deserve it.

 

\- - -

 

The firm knocks you leave on his room's door sound way too loud in the quiet hallway for your liking.

You can only assume that it's getting late by this point and you have no idea if he's actually in there. Could be sleeping. Could be with Terezi. But at least you're giving it a shot so that when you're inevitably disappointed by a lack of anything constructive happening tonight, you're prepared to tell yourself that you did, indeed, try.

However, the disappointment doesn't come to you.

Because he's in there.

You almost turn and leave the moment you hear rustling on the other side of his door because being alerted to his presence pushes the idea that you need to interact with him after your display in the common area to the forefront of your mind. You stifle the feeling and hold your ground. You hold your ground sternly and determinedly even as the door swings open.

He was probably sleeping. Or getting ready to sleep. He has nothing but underwear on and your eyes absolutely refuse, as if they're still fucking possessed by someone else, to stay on his face. You give him an accidental full-body once-over because you can't help it, you like his skin and you like his freckles (he has them on his face but he has more of them on his shoulders and his chest) and you like he's been filling out muscularly over the past couple of years. You like, as your gaze forcibly rises back upward, that he's answered the door with slightly messy hair and no sunglasses. You like that his irises are so ruddy and red, like yours will most likely be in a few years, and that he's squinting just slightly, enough to form lines around the corners of his eyes. 

You like this, and you like him, you like everything about him, straight down to the surprised and totally unguarded expression on his stupid face and all you can think to do is shove your devices in his direction and say, "Here."

He looks down at them. Takes them gingerly from you without knowing exactly what he's doing. "…what?" he asks, confused, because he has every right to be and you recognize that. They just look like tiny little mangled boxes of buttons and wires and you’d probably be pretty confused if someone just presented them to you without an explanation, too.

"They're finished," you say. "The things. I figured you had a right to know since you helped with them."

He stares at them for a second before his eyes, those fucking amazing eyes, flick back up to you and he raises a pale eyebrow. You're not used to seeing him without the shield of his shades. "You finished these? How the fuck?"

"It's a long story," you grumble back, crossing your arms, guarding yourself defensively. "Not really one I want to get into right now. But I thought maybe you'd be interested in." You take in a breath, let it out in a loud exhalation. "I don't fucking know, in testing them out with me to make sure they work the way I want them to."

Dave looks back down at them. Back up at you. Back down at them. You don’t know if he’s doing it on purpose to be a prick or if he really is _that_ sideswiped by you right now, but either way, you're starting to feel supremely foolish.

You realize that maybe trying to break the ice by shoving a new toy into his hands and telling him 'here, whatever, look at the thing' may not have been your greatest move. 

"Look," you say around another whooshing breath, reaching out for them. "Never-fucking-mind, just give them back and I'll get out of your fucking business, okay?"

He surprises you by, instead of handing the devices back to you, pulling them in closer to his chest, cradling them with one hand as the other closes itself around your outstretched wrist and tugs you forward. 

"Come in for a sec," he says, and it's like he's drawing you in with his face more than his words. You go without thinking. Who has the energy to think right now?

You close the door behind you as Dave sets the devices on a side table, and you stare at them expectantly, irritably because, hello? Experimenting? Testing them out? Did he not hear that part or what?

"I'm sorry," he says earnestly, like he’s been building up to this all day, spreading his arms a little.

All you can do is stare at his fucking body like a love-starved moron and mumble, "For what."

"I'm stupid," he goes on, and his arms drop when you snort on pure instinct. "Seriously, Karkat. I'm trying to talk to you, here."

Your roaming eyes stop roaming. They settle on his face and start _looking_.

You hate what you see there. You've never seen this look on his face before, especially without his glasses. It's so open and honest and, _fuck_ , it's so different and so perfect, you can't stand it, you hate him for making you feel this way.

"I'm stupid and I need to figure my shit out," he says. You resist rolling your eyes because you already know this. "I realize that. But after you walked out earlier I just… I felt like such a fucking idiot, dude, and I'm sorry. I try to hide feelings and stuff with petulance and that's not okay. Sometimes I guess I forget that other people feel things, too, and sometimes when I'm not honest and I just brush it all off like a big fucking baby, I actually CAN make other people feel like shit."

You just stare at him, wondering where he's going with this.

"I didn't mean to make you feel like shit," he deflates. "You're an asshole, Karkat, but I really like you and it. Just." He sighs, runs his hand through his already-mussed hair and he's _irresistible_ and everything is _awful_.

"Idunno where to go from here," he keeps going. "Because it's like, every time I feel like I'm forgetting that we maybe had this thing, almost, I immediately remember how big of a dickbag I was to you about the whole quadrant noise and I could've… I could've dealt with it better. You were right, back there, on the couch. You're _always_ fucking mad at me and you were right, I DO deserve it."

You don't say anything, so he heaves a strong sigh. There is just absolute, total defeat in his posture. Dave Strider, the cool, strong Knight of Time who has always held himself together for the sake of STAYING the cool, strong Knight of Time in the eyes of other people, is defeated. Right here in front of you.

"It was never supposed to be like this, you know?"

"Then what is it supposed to be like, Dave?" you hear yourself asking tiredly, and you barely recognize the voice coming out of your own mouth. It sounds weathered and beaten and worn like old leather.

He doesn't respond at first. He stares you down, helplessly, and the two of you are locked in what _feels_ like uncomfortable eye contact for a moment. You suppose this is why you spend an equal amount of time fighting and getting along. You challenge one another; you're both stubborn and backing down is NOT in either of your repertoires, even when you really _feel_ like you're in the wrong and you should. Just because you feel you're in the wrong doesn't mean you have to let the other know about it. That's how it's ALWAYS been between the two of you.

You're expecting him to wind up just doing that fucking thing he does when he's waiting for a response from you, that _okay, fucking, your turn I guess_ shrug that infuriates you because it feels so arrogant and condescending. 

But he doesn't do that. Instead, he grips the same wrist as he did before, pulls you in closer to him, and kisses you.

You are _sickened_ by how quickly you dissolve into it.

You should pull away. You know that. You should pull away and leave him standing there wanting you just as badly as you've been wanting him but now that his mouth is on yours, now that you're pulled up close to the warmth of smooth, naked human skin, you're fascinated and the last thing you want to do is leave the circle of his arms winding around your waist. You deserve to be selfish for a change, you figure, and this might be the only chance you get with him. This might be the only and _last_ chance you get.

So, instead of running away _fucking again_ , you press in closer to him. His face is between your hands and you're tilting your head up and more to the side. You're just so tired. You're tired of feeling torn and confused and now that you have this - he's finally caving, finally giving in to something that he's been trying just as hard as you have to stuff deep down - you will be _damned_ if you let it go without a hell of a fight. 

He lets out this amazing, soft, breathy noise into your mouth and you growl, deep in the back of your throat, moving forward to shift him back toward the bed. He goes willingly, leading you once he knows what you're up to, backing up until your world is shifting, falling, tipping forward and then he's under you again, this time on his bed, and this time you with no intentions whatsoever to let him slip away so easily.

He shifts back to get his head in the right place on his pillow and you move with him, immediately straddling his hips when he seems to settle and pushing down into him with everything you have, kissing him as hard as you possibly can, only distantly wondering if maybe your teeth may be knicking or hurting him but dismissing the thoughts when he pushes up just as hard, hands at the back of your head and neck and tongue charging itself into your mouth.

You feel something unclench in your chest and you groan without meaning to, your hold on him weakening the slightest bit because god _fucking_ damnit if this is everything you've wanted. He catches it and reacts the way you almost expect him to, curling his arms around you and flipping you, sending everything spinning as your back finds the bed and he's suddenly over you, still kissing you, bracing his hands on either side of your head and taking full control of the situation. 

And you let him. After what you've been through, he deserves to be the one doing the work. 

…most of the work.

He's not as tentative this time, probably because now he knows what to be expecting. You feel like you don't have time to waste explaining your anatomy to him or asking if he’s _sure_ because if you slow down, if you pause for even the smallest microsecond, he will stop again and he will pull away from you again and this time maybe it'll be for good because this is the first time he's got you caged underneath him while he's practically naked and the mood is just so serious and too heavy and too _perfect_ to ruin…

But he doesn't withdraw. He doesn't startle, this time. This time, he seems to give up trying to understand and just accept that things might not be the same about your bodies. This time, he moves with you, letting a soft laugh out against your mouth when you arch up against his thigh, hitching his breath deliciously when you situate your own thigh between his legs.

The more friction you generate between one another the more desperate he becomes, the more desperate _you_ become, and it's as though you've been climbing this hill, up and up and up, with slow, heavy footfalls and now that you have each other like this, now that your resolve has slipped between fingers like sand and lost to the winds of questionable and possibly irrational decisions, neither of you can stop yourselves from careening out of control and tumbling, full-force, into one another.

And it feels.

 _Amazing_.

Your clothes are clumsily yanked off and abandoned until you're just as undressed as he is and it's dark enough in the room now that you don't feel as self-conscious as you thought you would. You would expect the fabric of two pairs of underwear would be irritating but there is something really _good_ about it, so good that Dave gets himself fully between your legs and you move together, awkwardly at first and then finding a rhythm. As pleasure starts to burn its way up through every nerve in your body, as Dave pins your hands to the pillow on either side of you and leans in to start a messy and lascivious trail down the side of your neck with his mouth, you have to wonder, even briefly, exactly what must have been going through his mind after you left him in the common room, what force of will turned him completely around from barely suppressing his need for you to not suppressing it at all.

Then he sucks on your earlobe and you stop thinking about it.

You want more from him, much more, everything, but maybe that's not a good idea, maybe opening yourself up to him THAT entirely should be saved for a next time, assuming there will be one. THAT is when the discussion of anatomy is going to need to come into play, whether you like it or not, and you just don’t have the time for that right now. You really shouldn’t even be doing _this_ in all honesty, but you’re past the point of backing out now. The more you think about how unwise this could be, the more you think about how you _shouldn’t_ be doing this with Dave, _to_ Dave, letting Dave do what he’s doing to you, the more aroused you are and the closer you come to having your control jerked clear out of your hands.

Apparently he's thinking along the same lines as you are because although his hands fall to where your hips are joined, restlessly grinding together, he doesn't make any moves to actually remove any more clothing. Instead, he hooks his thumbs into the waistband of his underwear to slide them down a little, freeing himself, and repeats the same move on you.

The flesh-to-flesh contact is exactly what was missing. To know that what you're feeling against you is a result of what you do to him, to know that it's the exact other way around and he fucking _knows it_ by the way he half-groans, half-sighs into the crook of your neck, is everything and anything to you. The bare skin of your chests touching, the hot, labored breathing along your collarbone, his hips and hardness creating an incredible friction against yours, which is twisting and writhing and he _just doesn't care_ , it all unfurls inside of you like sweet, dark magic and you feel it build up quickly, taking you by surprise, and you're caught with your head back and your teeth ground together and your eyes barely open in the face of the incredibly hard decision to slow him down and prolong this, or to say 'fuck it' because you've been waiting _years_ for this and your body is greedy and ready to finally do what you've been holding it back from doing since the first day he kissed you.

He makes the decision for you. He starts moving faster, unexpectedly, pushing his face against your neck, huffing out fast, sharp breaths and gasps until you hear him choke back on the most beautiful noise you have ever heard, a noise you could have only fantasized about up until now, right here, right below your ear, close enough to feel on your skin as he trembles violently against you and ruts his hips through the waves of it.

You never thought just a single noise could be enough to tip you over, but it _does_ , it does _effortlessly_ , you’ve _never_ felt this good before, and as everything seems to implode in on itself and set your entire body on fire you cling to him, your fingers pressing hard into the skin and muscles of his back, like he's your very own lifeline, like he might be gone when you finally manage to open your eyes.

Like he might even be gone already.

The aftermath leaves you both panting, tired, sweating and _sticky_ and just generally unpleasant all around but the warm hum carrying itself lazily through your veins and your organs and your limbs makes it all so easy to ignore. You surprise yourself a little by letting your fingers sift through the hair at the back of his head and it’s so red, it’s _so dangerously red_ and you should feel _awful_ but you just can’t. You can’t bring yourself to do it. There should have been more biting. More force. More hair-pulling, more _something_ but it is what it is, and obviously your black feelings had temporarily receded.

 _Maybe next time_ , something ominous and wicked whispers in the back of your mind.

Exhaustion catches up to you very, very quickly and you are accidentally dozing off as he gets up to wipe himself off. He drops whatever he used onto your hips and slides back onto the bed next to you. You open your eyes and shift them over to him, watch with twisting, sick feelings of endearment as he settles on his stomach, tucks his face into the crook of his own arm and asks, drowsily, “That’s not blood, right?”

“Mm?” You glance down at the mess the two of you have made all over you and take the cloth, using the clean side on yourself. “No,” you answer, your face unnecessarily hot, your hands heavy like anchors. “that’s just the colour.”

“Ah,” he says softly, more into his pillow than anything. “A’right. Cool.” He yawns; it’s muffled. “Good.”

Only a moment later he’s starting to snore softly and you, deciding to push your looming concerns further onto the backburner and instead be lulled by the hypnotic rise and fall of his back, shortly follow suit.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> gonna be a short one - sorry, folks! at least I can say that a few good things are coming, for a change??
> 
> * * *

When you wake up, it’s with anxiety already clawing at the lining of your stomach because the moment you open your eyes, they land on him, still laying there next to you, still asleep, still breathing slowly and still beautiful.

You’ve trained yourself over the sweeps not to be a deep sleeper and it’s paid off so far, keeping you out of the trouble that only dreams could possibly get you into. Dave obviously doesn’t carry the same concerns as you do – he seems to be in it pretty deep, and you wonder for a second what he could be doing somewhere else, somewhere you can't currently see, while his body is resting here.

You fucked up.

 _God_ you fucked up.

You have never been more thrilled and more furious over one of your own fuckups like this before. Ever.

Only a year ago, you would have been overjoyed - a tough feat, for someone like you - to be in this position, waking up in Dave's bed, instantly remembering what happened to put you to sleep and either nestling back down in the barebones, natural comfort of another body next to you, a comfort you have admittedly never had before this moment (no, Gamzee does not count, that was entirely different), or prodding him awake for another go because. You have hormones. And now they're more awake than they've been in a long time.

Instead, you're sitting up and staring down at him and already combatting feelings of sick pride, disappointment, and guilt. Not exactly the 'morning after' sort of scenario you were hoping for.

You scrub your hands over your face and keep them there for a minute, trying to clear your thoughts enough to organize them. It's not working out so well; the fact that you still want to wake Dave up and trip into intimacy all over again despite how much you know you shouldn't is really inhibiting your ability to concentrate on resolving this whole mess. You feel like maybe _you_ should be the one to approach Terezi about this and try to explain it in a language she would understand, not in the jumbled and infuriatingly human way that you know Dave will, but then again… it's not your place. It's Dave's. 

Besides. Lying to her has always been difficult for you. Impossible, even. And there's no way at this point that you can look her in the unseeing eyes and tell her that what happened wasn't red.

Because it sure as shit wasn't black.

You eventually decide to drag yourself out of bed, careful not to jar the mattress enough to wake Dave up, and pull your clothes back on. You close the door slowly and quietly on your way out.

 

\- - -

 

You decide that maybe you could think better with some food in your system, even though you aren't feeling particularly hungry, and when you reach the kitchen you find yourself in the uncomfortable position of speaking with the last person you expected to be alone with today.

Her back is to you, and she is also trying to get food, standing on the very tips of her toes in the attempts to reach the highest shelf of a stock cabinet for it. She is wobbly, so she keeps having to sink back down onto the flats of her feet for a second before trying again. You freeze in the doorway leading into the kitchen and watch her, trying to read her movements and figure out what's wrong with her.

You realize it just as she turns to look over her shoulder. And she grins at you, a wide and open and uncharacteristic expression.

"Oh, _heeeey_ kiddo. Haven't seen you for a long time. You been… hiding out or something?"

The slur in her voice is telltale enough. You inwardly roll your eyes because, while you don't want to appear rude in front of her and offend her (mostly for Kanaya's sake), you also don't want to deal with drunken human shenanigans right now. "Uh, yeah," you respond flatly. "You could say that."

"You know you don't hafta do that," Rose goes on, turning back around and unsteadily rising back up to her tiptoes to try for the food again. "We're not, like. Mad at you or anything."

You raise an eyebrow and feel your hackles shoot up violently because why, exactly, does she presume you'd think everyone was mad at you? 

"I mean, it's not your fault he's unhinged, you know?" she goes on, as if reading your mind. Literally. _Fucking Seers_. "We're all tryin'a survive the best we know how and everything. Um." She lowers, turns again. "Could you maybe…" She trails off, squints at you, then lets out this weird guffaw of a laugh which she quickly smothers with a hand over her mouth. "Never mind, sorry, you're shorter than I am."

You are trying so hard not to bristle.

Before you can announce your desire to move on from this encounter, she starts looking around the kitchen, commenting in a vague and off-handed kind of way, "You really don't need to be that concerned."

You watch her cross the room to the cabinet of random utensils and pull out a spatula, suddenly feeling more guarded than ever. "Who said anything about me being concerned," you bite back cooly, but trying to trick a Seer with just tone of voice alone is practically fucking impossible.

"Oh, you know," she says casually, utilizing the spatula to gently nudge the can she's been going after to the edge of the cabinet and off, somehow managing despite how blurry around the edges she seems to catch it properly. She lets out a loud "HA!" and turns her grin back to you, holding the can up like a trophy.

You blink at her, unamused and uneasy with the direction of the conversation, and give her a flat, mute, and not necessarily genuine thumbs-up.

She laughs at that, a soft and delicate sound, starkly different from the last one. "Oh wow, he is rubbing off on you _sooo_ bad already."

Your spine stiffens.

"Oh _stop_ being so defensive, god. He's right, you are such a drama queen sometimes."

"Why are you two talking about me behind my back?" you feel yourself grind out through your teeth before you even realize that you were starting to bare them. "Don't you have more _important_ things to discuss when you're together or is the entire goddamn meteor on some kick with me that I've been completely fucking oblivious to until now?"

"Nobody has a vendetta against you, believe me. Not even him."

"Uh huh." Because you're not convinced and you feel like being sassy. You feel like you're entitled at this point.

"Seriously!" she insists, rolling her can between her hands messily and you can just see the stupid thing tumbling from her grasp any minute now and exploding into a disgusting mess all over the floor. "If you knew what I do, Karkat, you'd be _really_ surprised."

…well. Now that she's said this much, it'd be stupid to let her leave it at that. Keeping the suspicion out of your voice is impossible. "…what do you mean, 'surprised'?"

"Pleasantly," she tacks on unhelpfully, going in for a coy expression despite her inebriation-induced slightly squinting and pulling it off pretty well, actually. 

You're caught between begging her to tell you what the fuck she's talking about (does he _like_ you, does he _want_ this with you, is this not an destructively unrequited as you've been fearing) and walking away cooly to save face and let the paranoid 'what if's drive you slowly into insanity later on, when you're alone. This is a very strange spot to be in.

"…okay," you reply lamely, and it looks like insanity is the winner. Fantastic.

"Give it a little more time," she says, and this time, her voice is… surprisingly steady. You could swear a totally different person was talking to you only a few seconds ago. "And trust your instincts. Let stuff happen. If it feels like you should be taking action, I'd suggest you do it."

She smiles again, and all seriousness is completely lost. 

"Oh, and I'd stay away from that weird vent shaft if I were you, today. Just a thought."

And, with a flirtatious wiggle of her fingers, she's slipping out of the pantry and leaving you in yet _another_ uncomfortable position.

 

\- - -

 

She did warn you.

She warned you and you're doing it anyway.

Because who says to someone, 'here's some presumedly-hopefully good news about your weird but budding relationship - except, don't do this thing' and fully expects them not to do it?

Rose told you to trust your instincts and that's exactly what you feel like you're doing by going against her other suggestion and carrying yourself with a fair amount of trepidation toward the old vent entrance. Anything needing to be warned against in that general area instantly makes your stomach turn, but you feel like maybe you're starting to understand the passive and suggestive way that humans communicate. On top of that, Rose is a Seer - she _knows_ things the way nobody else does. It's not exactly like psychic capabilities but it's close enough that if she is dropping the hint to stay away from something, but smile at you in _that way_ , she actually means 'if you want to. otherwise, have at it.'

So. You're having at it.

And when you turn the corner and see that the grating is off of the wall, you're considering turning right back around and changing your damn mind.

That's not normal. The only other time you came on this vent being wide open like this, ever, was when Dave snuck in and you wound up having to follow and rescue him. You don't think Dave would attempt something like that again out of nowhere, so, as you pause at the corner and stare, you try to think of who else would possibly be heading in there to either see Gamzee, or… deal with him, like Dave did.

You may not be close now, and you don't really think you can even consider him your moirail anymore, but you still know him well enough to know that neither of those options, for anyone else on this meteor, can end well.

Swallowing back your nervousness (no, fear, that's fear, that's _rapidly strengthening_ fear and it's coming from a knowing and rational place this time instead of somewhere unsolicited), you make your way up to the hole in the wall, forcing yourself forward until you're right in front of it and peering into the darkness. You don't see anything, but there are voices, two of them, low and indistinct, coming from beyond the other side.

Compelling by curiosity, you push your head a little further into the opening, even going so far as to crawl in for the first foot or two, trying to pick up on details.

Identity. One of them is unmistakably Gamzee. The low, guttural, back-of-the-throat growl of his voice is one that you can pick out instantly. The other individual is speaking softly, so you hold your breath and strain your hearing as hard as you can.

The instant that voice heightens even a little bit, you recognize it. You're kind of glad you're holding your breath.

Terezi.

You suddenly feel violently protective, your first thoughts flying to _he's got her, I need to get in there before he hurts her_ , but you calm yourself down with disappointment pretty damn fast when you realize that there is _talking_ going on in there. Not fighting. Not violence.

What the fuck is going on?

You hear, clearly and loudly, a sharp hiss of pain from who you can only assume is Terezi. That protective streak is about to seize back up and you are so ready to haul yourself through the shaft and get yourself into the middle of another Gamzee altercation.

And then comes her moan.

Louder than the hiss, so you hear it even better. 

Raspy. Satisfied.

Your stomach turns even harder than it did on your way over here.

You back out of the shaft numbly.

You stare at the hole, not knowing what to think.

You turn and walk back down the hall, not giving one single fuck that your feet are taking you in the direction of Dave's room.

 

\- - -

 

He's still asleep when you sneak in, tucked on his side facing the wall.

You have had multiple discussions with him about something like this happening. He has vocalized to you that he realizes it's going to happen sooner or later. While you were in SOME part relieved that he's starting to understand the ground rules of your relationships a little better, the 'sooner or later' part still made you a little wary. In a complicated and somewhat delicate agreement such as a kismesitude, things don't usually tumble into the apparent human tradition of attraction, conversation, exchanging of personal information and a date to see if things get off on the right foot. A true, real kismesitude can be as unpredictable as the people involved in it. A lot of the time, from what you've seen and studied, they can happen out of what seems like absolutely nowhere.

You never saw this coming. You're willing to believe that Dave wouldn't, either. And you have a feeling that it's still a little too soon for him to properly deal with.

You always told Dave that historically and culturally, the only two emotions that a troll should ever actually feel are hate and pity. One of those emotions has your lungs in a vice grip as you slip off your shoes and crawl back into bed, carefully curling your body around the shape of his and tentatively resting your hand on his hip.

Feeling him breathe against you is comforting enough to calm you down but you couldn't doze off again right now even if you tried. 

You remain awake for awhile, and you think.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> in which Karkat realizes a few pretty important things and oh god it's. so fluffy. what have i become.  
> (thanks, again and always, for the comments and kudos and wonderful [tumblr](http://bbbbangarang.tumblr.com) messages!)
> 
> * * *

As your luck has it, you’re just about drowsy enough to maybe fall back asleep for a little while (an appealing concept that your equally heavy mind and body are SO into right now) when Dave starts stirring. He sucks in a long, slow breath and his body elongates against yours in a stretch and although you move your hand from his hip to keep things from getting TOO weird, you don’t necessarily shift away because _holy hell_ does that feel nice.

You feel like you should be holding your damn breath when he finally shuffles himself around to face you, but he doesn’t clam up or withdraw at all. He settles back down with his face resting on the crook of his elbow, relaxing back into the mattress, watching you.

And you lay there, watching him back, waiting for some sort of signal. Acceptance. Rejection. Dismissal. You really aren’t sure what to be expecting but you’re keeping your eyes on his, admiring the colour, kicking yourself for admiring _anything_ about him.

There’s a lot that you want to say, or at least feel like you _should_ be saying, but the words just aren’t forming correctly in your head. You want to tell him that what happened between you shouldn’t be a recurring thing and should be brushed aside as an accident even though everything in you wants it to bloom into something more. You want to tell him that he drives you absolutely fucking crazy because sometimes all you want to do is put his face through a brick wall and the other times you want to trail your hands across him and feel how he responds. You _really_ want to tell him that his matesprit – his girlfriend, _many pardons_ – has sort of unexpectedly started seeing someone in the black department, but while that’s all good and well for a troll (though, considering the circumstances, you wouldn’t necessarily call it ‘good and well’ at all, it’s actually kind of weird and screwed up), you know that it’s probably going to hurt him somehow because he _doesn’t get it_ , he’s admitted as such to you, and doesn’t understand that a troll cannot feel fulfilled as an active member of Alternian society until all four quadrants are full and properly functional.

As much as you want to just open your mouth and let everything spill out, feelings be damned, you can’t bring yourself to do it. Laying alone and listening to his soft snoring for a little while gave you the proper time to reassess what, exactly, is going on with you and you have come to a pretty miserable realization: you will never have all of your quadrants filled at once and it’s pointless to try.

This isn’t a typical self-deprecation tirade, either. You can tell when those are coming on and generally you know _exactly_ how to deal with them. This has you fucking stumped, though, because it’s so _real_ and _honest_. Culturally speaking, there’s no way for you to find all quadrants and keep them organized. First of all, you’re a damn mutant and finding someone interested in you enough to share a bed with you has been difficult in the first place. A good and proper kismesitude would require someone hating you in the most respectful way possible, and nobody can _really_ respect someone with blood like yours. It’s just not engrained into your speciatal make-up. It’s nobody’s actual fault. Your DNA just… doesn’t allow it. It’s that sad and it’s that simple.

Also, there’s the little bit about your species not really existing anymore because the world has basically ended and really all you have left is whoever’s alive, and the humans in this recent session. There’s that, too.

You are never going to feel fulfilled and you will never stop feeling restless over missing ‘crucial’ and ‘important’ relationships. You have come to terms with it much easier than you were expecting.

All the while, you’d had your forehead down and resting against the smooth plane of Dave’s back. It made things a lot easier to accept, somehow.

You can’t hate Dave that fiercely. Dave will never be your kismesis. It’s disappointing because when you first started tip-toeing around the idea, he seemed… perfect. He wanted to fight with you and be rough and draw only enough blood to get the point across and that was what you always assumed it felt like to _really_ be deep into a kismesitude. All of the components were correct and right there in front of you, waiting for you to piece them together naturally, and it fell through before you had a chance to finish. It fell through because you vacillated again.

You vacillated worse with Dave than you did with Terezi, because instead of being completely unable to make up your mind, you flew from black to red and you fucking _stayed there_ , no matter how much he annoyed you or how mad you got at him or how hard you tried to convince yourself that all you felt was the typical protective black-romance feelings over him and that was it.

There’s nothing black about it.

You are so fucking flushed for Dave that it hurts.

And now that he’s lying here next to you, watching you quietly without the barricade of tinted plastic severing your eye contact, and you can almost feel your fucking chest constrict with it, it’s _so bad_.

“Say something,” you hear yourself say, softly but grouchily, because you are the best at ruining things.

One corner of his mouth lifts a little. “Something,” he rasps back, his voice still thick with sleep, and you are both relieved and irritated. The combination is annoying enough to spike the irritation level a little bit higher.

“You know what I fucking mean.”

“Of course I do,” he drawls back and his grin is growing. “Seriously, dude? You think I’m gonna pass up the opportunity to ruffle your fur a little?”

“I don’t have fur,” you mumble, and he stifles a yawn into his pillow again.

“Mhm,” he hums, and slides his arm slowly over your waist.

He must feel you tense up a little because his eyes are back on you immediately and the weight of that arm, while not retreating entirely, lightens a bit. 

“No good?” he asks. “You officially a no-touchy zone?”

What do you even say to that, really? Your _preferred_ answer would be ‘touchy-zone, definitely touchy-zone, everything is a touchy-zone, touch all over please’ but things are still… weird and awkward. The guilt has certainly lessened, after hearing Terezi with Gamzee. The very thought of it makes your skin crawl and it has introduced a new shade of resentment into your feelings toward the both of them that make fooling around with Dave seem a little more acceptable, now.

You force yourself to calm down a little.

“It’s fine,” you say, and it comes out as a whisper and that’s not what you wanted at all, now you should probably just kill yourself.

Except not because Dave doesn’t blink an eye. No sarcasm, no fucking smartass response, just the slow, easy winding of his grip around you, more confident now, and the rustling of blankets as he reaches back to grab them and drape them over the both of you. Your heart is beating really fast because this is _a lot_ , this is just launching you further and deeper into something that you never saw coming until he had you underneath him and you’re not sure how to correctly process it, your compartmentalizing skills are for absolute shit right now and at LEAST you have the luxury of justifiably blaming him for it.

On the other hand.

His body heat is fantastic and his skin is soft despite the old acne scars scattered along his back and he smells good, he smells like _Dave_ , and there are blankets and pillows involved and you have no choice but to give into your natural instinct and burrow a little bit, ducking yourself a bit more under the covers and pushing your face against his chest. It feels like a switch has been flipped somewhere when you weren’t looking and all of those gut reactions to each other that you’ve been holding back for the past couple of years are suddenly a little too strong to ignore. Sure, you like insulting him and throwing things at his head because putting a chip in that dumb, lazy smile makes you feel triumphant. He probably LOVES riling you up because he’s a shithead and it amuses him. You still have those feelings of blatant, petulant annoyance with each other but now, there’s also this, something behind it that’s tugged the two of you closer, something that you can have to balance out the fact that it’s SO easy for you to get on one another’s nerves. 

This is something that you can carry with you to reassure you that even though he IS a shithead and even though he DOES make you want to tear your own ears off, at the end of the day, in private, there’s this whole different side of him that he’s willing to offer up to you.

You distantly wonder if this is what having a matesprit is like. The thought is bittersweet. More bitter than sweet. 

Even right now, he’s still not technically yours. But – goddamn you, you are such a horrible friend, _such_ a fucking selfish piece of shit – you can at least pretend that he is, for now.

“Listen,” he says out of nowhere, his voice a soft rumble in his throat just near your forehead. “If this is like… too much? Tell me, yeah?”

“It’s not,” you sigh because fuck it, right? Fuck it.

“I know there’s… stuff. Like, outside of us. Uh, this.” That correction sure came quick. “I know that and I’m not ignoring it, you know, I’m thinking this over, I’m not aiming to hurt anyone here—“

“Dave, I know,” you insist. He is starting to annoy you again and you’re not about to hide basically anything from him anymore at this point; you don’t make an effort to keep your voice from getting saturated with it.

“I’m just saying, man. I have no idea what you’re feeling and it’s cool, totally chill, we don’t have to talk about that, I am so ridiculously okay with avoiding the mushy feelings stuff if you are, but I just wanted—“

“Dave, shut up,” you say, and lift your head to place your mouth on the bump of his throat.

He shuts up. The bump under your lips shifts with a swallow.

“Okay,” he finally offers. Satisfied, you situate your own arms around him because you’re… kind of happy, and safe and comfortable and suddenly really fucking sleepy and you sort of just don’t really want to _hear_ him right now, you just want to enjoy this.

Surprisingly, he takes your request to kindly shut the hell up pretty easily. He stays quiet for awhile, letting you bask in what it feels like to be enfolded the _right_ way. It’s different with Dave than it was with Gamzee – Gamzee’s embrace was always one that left you feeling slightly hollow, like you were doing a favour for someone (technically, you suppose, you were) and just had to grit your teeth through it to make him feel better. With Dave… god, it’s all warmth. Not just the temperature, either. There’s a warmth in the way he’s holding onto you, like he actually fucking gives a shit about you. You’re an absolute _goner_ when he starts to sneak a hand up under the hem of your shirt, trailing his fingers up and down the length of your spine.

Eventually Dave’s hand starts to slow and raise your head a little to look up at him. You just manage to catch him with his eyes drooping shut, but your movement draws his attention back to you and you find your gaze locking with his again.

“How do you make that noise?” he asks.

“What noise?” you ask back, but the moment you speak, you realize that you’ve been clicking this whole time.

“That,” he points out. “The like. Buzzy, purr-y noise.”

“Oh,” you say lamely, drowsily. “I don’t know. I don’t do it on purpose, it just happens.”

“I like it.” You feel your fucking ears heat up, what the fuck. “Sounds like bugs or something. Not in a bad way. And I can feel it in your back, too, that’s kind of cool.”

Sometimes you forget that humans are a particularly simple-minded species.

‘Shut up,’ is all you can think to say, without malice of course, and you do almost say it but don’t get a chance to because he’s leaning down and his lips are on yours and even though it’s short and really just a peck, it has all the power in the fucking doomed universe to derail you. You _should_ be used to kissing him by now, but you’re definitely not used to it being something that’s _actually okay_ to do. You’re not used to it being that _normal_.

As much as you would like to delve into THAT a little more and see where it leads you, you have to admit that you could possibly embarrass yourself by falling asleep in the middle of it. Dave re-situates the blankets around you and you are utterly caged under them and you have never been more comfortable in your entire fucking life, holy shit.

“You gonna be okay sleeping without your goo?” he asks. He’s sounding just as tired as you feel.

“Should be fine, god, leave me alone already,” you mutter back because your eyelids weight four hundred fucking tons and you are not about to worry over something like that.

He just laughs a little. He gets you. “No nightmares allowed,” he instructs. “I’ll be here in case you don’t listen to me and have them anyway like a brat.”

Somehow, you manage to get in a soft, amused snort before you are completely stone-cold out.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> and we finally settle into some semblance of complacency. surely nothing bad can go wrong now, right?
> 
> * * *

The next morning is thankfully not uncomfortable at all.

You wake up quietly, obviously not knowing what to expect, but Dave follows suit soon after and is chatty as usual the moment he’s pulled fully back into consciousness. It does still irritate you a little, but _only_ a little. The fact that he’s talking at all – the fact that he was even still there when you opened your eyes – is settling a blanket of calm over you that even your tendency for easy annoyance can’t fully penetrate.

You’re happy. Like, _happy_. It’s weird.

You aren’t really listening to what he has to say as he gets dressed. You’re a little more focused on cleaning up and holing yourself off to think on things a little more – not in a bad way, just in a thoughtful way. You really don’t want to be so introspective and truth be told, it feels more and more uncharacteristic for you as time stretches on, but you’ve never done something like this before and you aren’t like him, you can’t just Be Okay throwing yourself carelessly into a situation without understanding it and picking it apart first.

The most awkward part about this entire scenario is trying to extract yourself. You stand by his door and watch him finish up, not even fully realizing that your hands are twisting together a little in front of you. It’s even worse when he is finished and just stands there looking back at you.

“I’m gonna… go for awhile,” you say stiffly.

You’re in the middle of quickly devising a reason for your quick escape that won’t make him feel awful or offend him but he just casually shrugs and says, “A’right.”

You are so used to complicating things that you’ve begun complicating _people_ , and sometimes you forget that not everyone needs to have a fully realized excuse for everything.

This does nothing but teach you that you should probably stop assuming the worst out of Dave.

“Okay,” you reply, and half-turn to reach for the doorknob. “Uh. See you later.”

“Wait, hold on,” he interjects, moving across the room toward you. He steps in close, his hands finding your hips, and leans down to push a short, surprisingly thorough kiss to your mouth.

“Come back later,” he says, with his lips still very close to yours. “We can give your thingies a test run.”

Your _what_?

“My what?” you ask because with Dave, EVERYTHING and ANYTHING is an innuendo and sometimes you just need the fucking clarification.

He smirks. He knows what he said, immature little nooksniffer that he is. “Your thingies,” he repeats. “The walkie-talkie bits. Those guys.”

“Oh.” …oh. “Oh. Yeah. Fine. Fine, whatever.”

You slip out of the room and leave him snickering behind you, with your mood ruffled and the tips of your ears on fucking fire.

 

\- - -

 

You hesitate outside of Rose’s room, regarding the door with a wariness that you’ve only ever felt around the human females – even Jade, whom you’d briefly started to feel stirrings for awhile back. There’s something about them that you can’t pinpoint (which frustrates you to no end), something mysterious and two-sided, like they say one thing to you but could mean any of the five hundred other fucking hidden meanings underneath it. You find it very, very hard to trust them fully despite how well you know you _have_ to this far into the game.

Rose is someone that you ESPECIALLY do not trust, which is funny because she’s technically the most trustworthy one out of the lot. You aren’t really coming here to speak to her, but you’ve checked the common area and Kanaya’s room and both were empty, so it’s safe to assume that Kanaya is probably visiting her matesprit. These days, if you need to find one of those two, the easiest way is to figure out where the other is first.

You know for an absolute fucking fact that you do not want Rose present for the conversation that you’re about to have. Not only is she a Seer and will probably get an incredibly detailed feel for you before you can open your mouth, but she’s also Dave’s littermate. The idea of sitting around talking about how gooey and horrible you feel over Dave right in front of her is… just so supremely uncomfortable.

Kanaya’s advice, though, could REALLY work in your fucking favour right now because you have _no idea_ what you’re getting yourself willingly involved in.

You take a deep breath, square your shoulders, draw up your posture to look a bit more confident (this is a tactic you always use, and you stick to it even though you fail _so profoundly_ at it, you feel like you probably just look like a little wriggler trying to be a grown up and that is a lot more insulting than helpful to you in this circumstance), and give the closed door a few firm knocks.

Rose answers, blinking down at you with surprise. Not even _she_ was expecting you to drum up the nerve to approach her so forwardly. Take that, Seer. Point goes to Team Vantas.

“Hi, Karkat,” she greets you, her voice light and amicable. “What can I do for you?”

It’s like your conversation the day before didn’t even fucking happen, what the hell.

“I’m looking for Kanaya.".

Rose’s black lips turn up in a small smile and she steps aside, opening the door a little wider to give you a better view into her room. Kanaya, having heard her name, is just rising from her seat on Rose’s bed when your eyes fall on her.

“Is everything okay?” she immediately asks, taking a step forward, but Rose lifts a hand to stop her.

It seems she can already sense something. Not that you’re surprised. “I’ll let you two talk in private,” she says as she leaves the door open and brushes by you. Before she leaves, she turns to look at you again. Her smile grows a little and you swear you can suddenly see a fucking resemblance to Dave in there and it is really fucking unnerving.

“Try to take it easy,” she murmurs. “You’re looking a little… flushed.”

You’ve never glared at the back of a retreating individual harder in your life.

“Karkat?” Kanaya prompts softly from inside the room. It snaps you out of it and you take another long breath, stepping over the threshold and closing the door behind you.

Kanaya sits back down on the bed and pats the spot next to her. You hesitate because that’s Rose’s bed and beds are kind of incredibly personal, somehow? Not that you really have any room to talk, you just intruded on Dave’s twice in one night, and one of the times was technically uninvited because Dave was asleep. That’s different, though. You _wanted_ to be in Dave’s bed and you _wanted_ to see what went on under the covers. You have not even a LITTLE interest in what goes on in Rose’s bed but there you go, involuntarily thinking about it and wishing your brain had a reset button because _No_.

Kanaya watches you expectantly. The longer you linger in one spot without taking her invitation, the harder her eyebrows seem to try and touch in the middle, the deeper the creases across her forehead get.

You shuffle forward and reluctantly sit on the bed beside her.

“Talk to me,” she demands gently.

…how? How the fuck can you word it? You would REALLY like to say so many things but you’ve grown so accustomed to restraining yourself that you literally have no idea how to get it out.

“I think I made a mistake,” you start, and you must sound miserable because her expression hardens a little and her posture straightens.

“Talk to me.” This time, the demand ISN’T so gentle. This time, judgment is completely out the window and you can hear in Kanaya’s tone that she’s ready for you to hit her with anything.

Which you do.

About the building kismesitude that went to shit, about your moirailegience completely crumbling out from underneath you, about Dave and Gamzee’s really fucking close encounter and about the communication device project and about how your feelings changed so quickly that you didn’t even notice when it happened and about how guilty you feel about it all when it comes right down to it because you weren’t taking Terezi’s emotions into account and you were choosing to ignore the extent of Dave’s quadrant ignorance for the chance to kiss him and really, the more you talk, the angrier you feel at yourself, even though only, what, half an hour ago you could have sworn that your fucked up little life had finally found its own slice of serenity.

You leave out the part about Terezi and Gamzee. And you leave out the fact that kissing hadn’t been the only thing to happen in Dave’s room yesterday. There are some things, you feel, that Kanaya doesn’t HAVE to know about.

By the time you’re finished, ending on the most horribly clichéd note of “…and I have no fucking idea what I’m doing.”, Kanaya’s face has gone through a complete loop from concerned to stern to concerned again, her eyes set in a strange little half-squint but the lines reappearing above her brown, her lips twisting slightly as if she’s playing along her teeth with her tongue.

“That is… quite the predicament,” she finally says and you groan, pushing your face down into your hands. “I knew about the kismesitude from over a year ago—“

“Two years,” you supply, muffled into your palms.

“—but I never suspected that it would shift into a red quadrant. You just seemed so _sure_ …”

You glance up at her and she trails off.

“…I’m sorry. Have you perhaps thought about pursuing a moirailegience with him, instead?”

You have to admit, you haven’t.

“No,” you confess. “it could _maybe_ work, if circumstances were a little different. At this rate, I’m in it a little too deep for something pale.”

She’s quiet for a moment.

“Does he reciprocate your feelings?”

“I’d like to think so. He’s the one who initiated all of… yesterday.”

“Have you spoken with Terezi about this, yet?”

“No...” _Uugh_.

“Good. If anyone speaks to her, it should be her matesprit’s responsibility.”

Her inadvertent agreement on that particular matter is certainly a weight off, but at the same time, a foreign sort of fear sweeps over you – the idea of Dave approaching Terezi, trying to make sense of the situation you’ve all found yourselves in and trying to figure out where to go from here. If he finds out about Gamzee, how horrendous and betrayed will he feel? If she finds out about you and Dave, how betrayed will SHE feel? If they talk and reach an understanding, will things go back to the way they were, with her as his main focus and you, once again, forgotten on the sidelines?

This Is Why You Fucking Hate Emotions, right? You can tell it to yourself over and over and it will never sound less significant. It is your sad, personal mantra.

You’re being quiet for too long, because Kanaya lifts her hand and places it on your shoulder. “What do _you_ want to come of this situation?”

You snort. “Isn’t that obvious?”

“It is, but you need to say it aloud. Sometimes saying it aloud makes it a little easier to understand.”

You roll your eyes and rest them skeptically on her. “Are you kidding me?”

“I am not kidding at all,” she says, and it’s obvious that she’s not.

You sigh loudly, swiping a hand through your hair. It comes out in your sigh, just a whooshing, almost desperate breath of, “I want to be his matesprit.”

…whoa.

Son of a fuck, she was right.

You hate it when that happens.

“I want to be his matesprit,” you repeat, this time sounding more fucking shocked than anything.

She’s trying not to smile. “See?”

Your face is suddenly buried back into your hands because just that one sentence somehow managed to put fucking _everything_ into full, blaring perspective for you. “Fuck, I want to be his matesprit, I am such a—“

“Stop,” Kanaya cuts you off, kind of harshly, actually, and her hand squeezes your shoulder a little. “See, you always do that. Why do you always do that?”

You peek at her from between your fingers. “Do what?”

“You are always so ready to blame yourself for something. You should _actually_ be giving yourself a fighting chance at actually being happy, in my opinion.” You open your mouth and she hisses at you to stop you again. “Ssstz, _no_ , I know what you are about to default to and I will not allow it.”

Are you really _that_ goddamn predictable? Motherfuck.

“We are all capable of making our own decisions and if you want to be with Dave, you need to be up front with him. Do not give him any room to sneak around the subject, either. Be authoritative and confident about what you are deciding because the only person who could allow him to possibly walk all over you and your admittedly fragile feelings is _you_.”

This is why you go to Kanaya with your stupid bullshit.

“My feelings aren’t _fragile_ ,” you argue back with no heat, and the tension in her expression relaxes a little. That makes you feel better, somehow.

“So what is your next move?” she pushes, and you know it’s a test, you can hear the taunting, slight upward swing in her voice.

You sigh again. Not as explosively, this time.

“Talk to Dave,” you reply.

“Correct. It could be the smartest choice you have ever made, right?”

“I guess.” You pause, and then glance at her sidelong. “What’s it like, anyway? Dating a human?”

She blinks at you before you face erupts into a brilliant smile. “Exciting, mostly,” she says quietly, and the expression must be infectious because you feel yourself beginning to smile, too. “They are the most _interesting_ species, and almost all of the best, most thorough learning is done through direct contact with them.” Her smile becomes slightly lopsided. “Emotional and physical.”

“Rose knows about quadrants, doesn’t she? And she’s okay with it?”

“She accepts it, yes. She has even gone so far as to study about it.” You feel a small, distant twinge of envy and try to ignore it. “She has also expressed a desire to learn our language when the game is finished.”

You pick at the hem of your jeans thoughtfully.

“Maybe it runs in the family,” you mumble, and you mean it in kind of a sad way but Kanaya giggles.

“I do not know Dave very well, admittedly, but he does not strike me as the type to openly discriminate. He’s already shown interest in you, physically, hasn’t he?”

Why is your fucking face ALWAYS hot these days. “Uh, yes.”

“Then I would give him more credit. He seems like a creature that just needs time to adapt to the changes surrounding him.” She nudges you a little. “Talk to him and allow him to sort his own relationship out, first. If it falls in your favour, you will feel much less guilty about it in the end.”

You try to imagine what it would be like to approach Dave on the level of a matespritship without the weight of just feeling _bad_ about what you’re doing. You imagine what the addition of confidence coming from the both of you could do for you, especially intimately.

You imagine that for awhile, actually, long after you’ve left Rose’s room.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> writing this story between jobs at work is keeping me from going insane every day, let me tell ya.  
> I'd like to state for the record that I really, REALLY do not like the word 'retard' when not being used by its proper, actual definition, but Dave is a teenager and also an idiot. writers gotta write. just... putting that out there.  
> I can never say this enough - the comments, kudos, and [Tumblr](http://bbbbangarang.tumblr.com) buttpats/greetings have been REALLY appreciated. thank you, guys. :)
> 
> * * *

“Check, check, word, this is a check, do you copy number one, are you picking up what I’m slapping down, are these decibels phons and sons oozing through to you like sweet, sweet hot caramel, have I safely and consensually penetrated your auditory forcefield, come in, come in, this is only a test, if this had been an actual emergency you wouldn’t even notice because you’d be existentially _wasted_ , son, you’d be the fucking butter on a nice thick slice of antimatteral _toast_.”

“Wow, can you shut up?”

“You asked me to say something, champ.”

“Some _thing_ , singular. You are saying some _things_ , plural, and they’re actually ludicrous enough to make my head hurt so stop.”

“You are such a killjoy, man, are there no sides of the bed that are actually good for you to wake up on?”

You can hear the stupid grin in his grainy voice.

“No,” you snap back, half telling the truth and half just trying to get him to focus. “Every side is the worst and being awake is the worst. Can we do this now, please?”

“We’re already doin’ it, man,” he says. 

The most predictable human being in the world, Dave Strider - you grumble “We’re making it happen.” along with him as he says it. All this does is make him laugh and you feel _yourself_ starting to grin against your own will.

“Alright, alright, just… take this seriously for now, okay?” You’re certain he can probably hear YOUR smile now, how frustrating. “You can fool around all you want after we’re done with the initial tests.”

"What exactly am I supposed to be doing right now?”

“Where are you, currently?”

There’s a pause. “Uhhh near the pantry, ish. I’d say like a hallway away from it.”

“That bodes well, you don't sound terrible right now.” You stare down at the ugly, naked little box of wires cradled on the palm of one hand, eyes jumping along the four knobs along the bottom front of it. Timidly, you take one of them between two of your fingers. “Okay, I don’t know what the very last knob on the right does but I’m about to try it. I, um.” You’re suddenly chagrined. Damnit. “…I need you to talk for a second.”

“This coming from the guy who just told me to shut up. Like three times.”

“I take it back, asshole,” you snap. So much for the smile in your voice, right? “Just don’t talk about inane, skull-rotting horseshit this time.”

“This is just a huge, elaborate excuse to listen to my voice and fawn all over me without me having to see how flustered you are in person, isn’t it? You’re so _sweet_ , Karkat, dang.”

“Motherfucker _please_ , the self-flattery is a waste of air at this point, don’t get too excited. Just fucking… describe where you’re walking or something, I just need some constant noise going so I can adjust the frequency levels. You’re coming in a little grainy.”

“You have to know that you’re just _begging_ for a that’s-what-she-said joke here, am I right?”

“I hate you, you’re fucking disgusting.”

“And I don’t even try, how about that. Okay, let’s see.” He pauses for a second. “I’m turning the corner. I’m heading down the hallway that leads to the kitchen, you know, the really fucking creepy long one where one of the lights blew last week so now it’s just shadows and shit?”

“Uh huh,” you respond automatically, distractedly, as you twist the knob up a little further.

“I am just walking now. Just stridin’, you know. Literally.” His voice is coming in a _little_ clearer now, but it’s still not enough for you to be satisfied with. Your explanation for the perfectionist mindset toward this particular experiment is that if things go awry once this trip is over, and somehow you’re separated from each other, you are going to need as much clarity as you can possibly manage. You don’t want to take any chances. “Coming up on the corner into the kitchen. Aaaand turning the corner. No one is in here. I am alone. Surrounded by food. Surrounded by _sustenance_.”

You squint down at the device and go for another knob – this one, all the way to the left. You instantly regret it – the entirety of Dave’s room suddenly shrieks with rebounding feedback, loud enough to make you cringe and turn the knob all the way the fuck back down.

“Jesus Christ, Karkat,” he hisses. “The hell are you doing over there?”

“Oh, _fuck you_ , Dave, at least I’m doing something.”

“Hey, I’m doing something too, bro, I’m standing in the middle of the kitchen like a fucking retard with a box in my hands that just keeps barking insults at me when it’s not trying to render me completely deaf. What, you want me to break down crying and eat my feelings now that I'm here or what, what angle are you taking this at right now.”

At least he’s talking. It’s enough for you to turn the knob slowly back up to where it was, then carefully up a bit more. This time, you avoid the feedback entirely.

“Are you ignoring me?”

“I’m _working_ , Strider,” you growl. “One of us has to actually be useful, and no, walking to the fucking kitchen is _not_ useful, it’s just convenient.”

“Okay, let’s not fight, you’re too hurtful when you’re ruffled.”

“The good news is that you sound much clearer now, at least.”

“Is there bad news?”

“Yeah, you’re a douchebag, that’s the bad news.”

He huffs out a small laugh. “You’re really out for my skin today, aren’t you?”

Maybe it’s because you managed to bring more clarity to the quality of his voice, but there is something in the way Dave says that that makes your stomach jump involuntarily. His pitch seems lower and it sounds like there might be a suggestive tonality in there, like if he could vocally wiggle his eyebrows at you, that would be what it sounds like.

“If you only knew,” you shoot back purposely, catching yourself in one of those brilliant but rare moments of self-confidence, when you’re willing to sacrifice a little bit of your dignity just to get a reaction out of someone. You lower your own voice. You _purr_ it at him. You want to rock him on his foundation a little bit by switching tactics unexpectedly and swiftly.

There’s a moment of silence, and before you can begin to feel like maybe it was a lost cause and you should be embarrassed, Dave clears his throat.

Flirtation: pointed success. Good work, you.

“Uh, so yeah, I’m. Gonna head over to Can Town now and we’ll see if the sound carries.”

You’re glad you’re alone because you are just fucking _beaming_. It’s not often self-confidence pays off for you the way you want it to, but when it does, it _does_.

“Yeah, do that,” you drawl back, thoroughly pleased with yourself and not bothering to hide it.

He clears his throat again (that’s twice now, the unflappable Dave Strider is officially flustered) and after a handful of seconds says, “Okay, I’m in Can Town.”

“You sound the same,” you tell him, heading to the door to step out into the hallway, moving in the opposite direction of the kitchen. “I’m going toward my room, now. Keep talking.”

“Uhh, there are cans. And the Mayor’s here! Hey buddy. What’s shakin? You seem really excited today. Haha, Karkat, we’re fist bumping, this dude has the tiniest hands, it’s so cute.”

You roll your eyes. “Uh huh. Am I breaking up at all or do I still sound okay?”

“There’s a little bit of feedback, like someone’s rubbing a tissue over a phone receiver or something. It’s not a huge deal but it’s kind of annoying.”

“Yeah, we don’t want annoying. See the knob all the way to the right? Turn that clockwise just a little. That fixed the problem for me when I was having it.”

“You sound like a bona fied IT guy, man. I can just see you wearing khakis and a light blue polo shirt with a name tag that says, like, ‘My name is Karkat, how can I help you?’ but you’re all fucking scowling at people like you don’t want to even exist on the same dimensional plane as them let alone help them fix their shit. So basically you look like every IT guy I’ve ever seen, except you have horns.”

“Dave. Are you turning the knob.”

“Yeah.”

“And?”

“It’s better. It’s not totally clear but you don’t have that weird face-against-phone noise anymore— what? …hold on, dude, the Mayor’s tugging on my pants here. What’s going on, man?”

You sigh, aggravated and a little put-upon that whenever the Mayor is around, he somehow manages to snag and keep Dave’s full attention.

“Man, figuring you out is hard. What’s that Lassie? Timmy fell down the well? Timmy flung himself off the meteor in a fit of cabin fever-induced wild abandon, content with the concept of floating around in nothing for the rest of his presumably short existence?”

“Dave,” you grind out.

“No seriously, wait, I’m trying to communicate here. …what? …where the hell are we going, Mayor?”

NOW your interest is perked. “Dave? What’s going on?”

“He’s dragging me out of the kitchen. I’m not sure where we’re going yet but he seems real agitated about something.”

You suddenly feel very uneasy. You listen to the shuffling of background noise and very distant footsteps as Dave is apparently taken further across the meteor. What makes you especially nervous is that it takes awhile before Dave finally talks again. The quality of sound on the communicator is much worse, more broken up now.

“Dave?” you prompt, because he’s been quiet for too long and that is very uncharacteristic of him, even in the worst situations. You hear him take a breath to respond, but he holds it for a second. The sound is layered with static.

“…yeah. I’m gonna turn this off for a few minutes, okay? It’s super fuzzy. I just need to check on something really quick.”

“What’s going on?” you demand, because he is making you fucking nervous and you do _not need this bullshit_ right now.

“I’ll come right back, I swear. Just hang tight. Go back to my room and wait for me to contact you.”

He turns his communicator off even as you’re opening your mouth to tell him to wait. That last part was too fucking ominous. You hate not knowing what’s happening and you hate sitting with a stomach twisting nervously and nauseously. But what the fuck else can you do? You have no idea where he is, and the meteor is pretty big.

You reluctantly move back to his room, shutting the door behind you and sitting on the edge of his bed. You keep the communicator switched on, sitting right beside you, and you watch it.

 

-  -  -

 

Anywhere between half an hour and forty-five fucking minutes goes by with chilling, literal radio silence.

You can feel your pulse pounding helplessly in your temples and you can’t shake that horrible, constricting feeling of impending panic building and churning inside of you. Out of every single fucking awful emotion that someone can feel, across that _entire spectrum_ , panic is the one that looks the worst on you. You would rather feel physical pain than panic. 

You wish you had something to do with yourself and you could very easily slip straight into full-blown madness, sitting here fucking waiting for him to either turn his goddamn communicator back on and talk, or show up. Or something. _Anything_. You try to distract yourself in a bunch of different ways; you try to find patterns on the ceiling of the room and trace them with your eyes, over and over. You try to do simple math equations, multiplication tables, fractions in your head but that loses your interest even quicker. You even try to sneak onto his computer but the asshole has the fucking thing password protected.

You may have _possibly_ shimmied back on the bed and grabbed his pillow, cradling it between your chest and your pulled-up, bent knees. Maybe. That _might_ have happened, for a few minutes. But nobody will ever know for certain, will they? No, they won't.

Getting attached to someone emotionally is fucking hard work, you’re growing to learn. You wish you knew how hard it was sooner, honestly. You aren’t just getting the physical and romantic rewards; you also have to shoulder the disappointments, the anger, the worries ( _god_ the worries) and at this stage, so early into finally feeling fucking something for someone, you can’t tell for sure if it’s worth it or not. Not like you have any past experiences to compare it to or anything.

When you finally make contact again, it isn’t through the communicator. Your ears pick up the faint sound of shuffling steps getting closer to the door, and you’re up on your feet before you can stop yourself.

The moment the door opens, you swear you could fucking strangle him.

Dave is, frankly, a mess. He’s dirtied, his clothing is rumpled all over, soiled, and torn in some places. One of the lenses is missing from the sunglasses still on his face. His lip and nose are bleeding and his face is speckled with fresh and rapidly darkening bruises. There’s a little blood, actual origin so far unknown, gracing one of his temples and seeping down into his sideburn. 

You are terrified and furious, even as he smiles lopsidedly at you.

You could absolutely fucking kill him, if only because someone else apparently didn’t bother to.


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter contains a male-on-male sex scene and is NSFW.  
> there they (finally) go. go, boys, go.
> 
> * * *

After all but dragging Dave into the room and slamming the door shut after him (you even lock it; you’re not about to take any fucking chances), you have to physically restrain yourself from blowing up at him as you guide him to the edge of the bed and sit his stupid, reckless ass down. Normally you _would_ just resort to an explosion, really just to make yourself feel better because if that panic was only coiling before, it’s sure as shit snapping loose now, but you can’t seem to bring yourself to actually do it when he looks like he’s been pretty seriously hurt.

You rummage around his room for a rag (you find one, and check multiple times to ensure that it’s clean because you don’t trust him, he’s filthy sometimes) and also manage to come across a half-finished old bottle of water; convenient, considering you do not want to leave the vicinity of the room right now given the circumstances. He’s just gingerly sliding his glasses off of his face when you approach him with your findings, and he looks at them, looks at you, and raises an eyebrow.

“Really?” he asks, amused.

“There’s _blood_ , you fucking moron,” you hiss back as you wet the rag with water. “What else am I going to use to remove it, air?”

“You’re not my wet nurse,” he responds, so casual for someone who’s apparently just gotten the shit kicked out of him. He inspects his glasses, sighs, and tosses them across the room where they land on a pile of clothing that has probably been there for weeks. Or longer. You don’t care to wager an actual guess. “You don't have to remove shit. I can take care of myself.”

You scoff and gesture to all of him with the rag. “Yeah, you've done a swell job of that so far. Asshole. Shut up and sit still.”

He seems to sink into where he’s sitting grudgingly, and you get to work cleaning up the blood at his temple. There’s a lot more than it initially looked and you end up dedicating an entire half of the rag just on the one task. Once it’s clean enough, you can see the wound through his light hair and it looks like someone took a battering ram to the side of his goddamn head, it’s almost a miracle he was able to stand let alone drag himself back here. You’re fascinated, and you’re afraid. 

“This is a fucking mess,” you say as you withdraw and hold the rag and bottle out for him, your voice softening involuntarily. “Wipe your face. You’re bleeding from everything.”

He takes what you’re offering with sluggish limbs and (surprisingly) obeys you while you look around for a discarded piece of clothing.

You hold up an older looking t-shirt to him as he dabs at the corner of his lip. “Do you still wear this a lot?”

He raises an eyebrow. “Uh, I don’t know?”

That’s good enough for you. You dig your claws into the fabric and tear.

“Whoa, wait, hey,” he protests loudly, frowning. “You don’t just rip up peoples’ clothes like that you fucking spazz, what the hell.”

“You won’t give a shit in an hour, Dave,” you reply coolly, ripping until you have one long strip of fabric. You drop the rest of the shirt back on the floor and move back to him, waiting for him to stop wiping his nose and glaring at you like a wriggler about to throw a temper tantrum.

“I probably liked that shirt once,” he says glumly, and sniffs as he finishes his task. “You better keep a close eye on _your_ clothes from here on out, buddy.”

You don’t respond. You just set about getting the fabric around his head and making sure that the knot is tied tightly along the afflicted temple. He’s got the advantage of God Tier and his healing takes very little time, but head wounds are serious shit and you want all the bases covered. 

Thankfully, he doesn’t have any complaints while you’re doing it. He busies himself with flicking through his sylladex, pausing for a moment to remove his communication device and hand it over to you in a quiet, guilty kind of way. He eventually comes across an extra pair of shades and breathes an audible sigh of relief as he pops them out.

He makes a move to slide them on, but you reach down and grip his arm to stop him. “Nope. Not right now. There’s too much trauma over here, leave it alone for now. Put the fucking glasses down.”

You never realized how vulnerable Dave can _actually_ look without the aid of anonymity that his glasses tend to give him. When those huge lenses are covering the space between his cheekbones and his eyebrows, you see a frustratingly blank page. When his eyes are uncovered, they give a lot away. He’s clearly not as adept at hiding his feelings as you thought.

He does as he’s told, but he looks extremely out of his element – exposed, vulnerable, and maybe even a little freaked out despite the inevitability of him denying such a claim. There’s something else there, though, that you don’t like seeing. He almost looks a little upset. The sad kind of upset. It’s showing in the slight and most likely subconscious upturn of his inner eyebrows.

And you’re staring down at him, dumbly holding his device in your hands, trying to figure it all out.

“Are you going to tell me what happened now?” you finally ask, reaching over to the wooden box that he’s turned into a bedside table to set the device aside for now. 

He folds his hands in his lap. You’re surprised that he’s still holding eye contact, what with being so obviously uncomfortable.

“The Mayor saw ‘Rez disappear into the vents.”

Ah.

“Probably figured she was in trouble. I thought the same thing, you know? I was like, hell yeah little dude, let’s go save her and be heroes. Dunno why I said ‘let’s’, I wouldn’t let him fuckin’ follow me. I ain’t putting the Mayor in potential danger.”

You lift a hand to massage the bridge of your nose. “You went back into the vents. God, you’re an idiot.”

“Dude, I can heal and shit, _fuck_ my personal health. There was a pretty realistic possibility of Terezi being in trouble with a murderous fucking psycho, what else would you suggest I do?”

He has a point. You falter, sheepishly.

“So I hauled ass in there all self-righteously like a good little Knight and.” He stops, and _now_ is when his eyes avert. He stares across the room at nothing for a moment. You get the feeling that he suddenly doesn’t particularly want to tell this story. “…basically, clown was down there, he kicked my ass, all joyfully and shit, you know, because that’s not horrifying at all. But he held himself back from aiming to paint his walls with my brains this time. Couldn’t tell you why. Maybe he figured you’d come rip a bitch if he went that far. Or maybe he realized that I’m too startlingly beautiful to eliminate entirely. I’d like to think it’s that option.”

You hate that you feel the need to hesitate even a little before asking, quietly, “…and Terezi?”

And HE hesitates. You know why. He knows something that he presumes you do not, now. There is a very large, very wide communication block between you but honestly, you’re not exactly jumping to clear it all up just now because he _went back into the goddamn vents again_. He could have ACTUALLY been permanently dismantled or ACTUALLY killed this time. Imagining Terezi and Gamzee in a black relationship together was enough to make you feel queasy, but picturing Gamzee’s hands all over Dave with the intention of physically harming him… just…

“She’s fine,” he answers stiltedly. You already know this. Of course she’s fine. “Don’t worry about her. It’s fine.”

The silence that falls between you is so awkward. You’re not even looking at one another. 

It starts to get under your skin, so you speak up. “You should change or something. You look like a horror movie.”

He hums softly with wry amusement and slowly stands up. You don’t make a move to assist him, but you are certainly at the fucking ready just in case he needs it. He hisses as he removes his shirt, and you let your eyes roam over the damage. His skin is very pale so you aren’t surprised that you can already see the bumps and bruises and scrapes, and you _hate_ what you’re looking at because someone had the fucking audacity to lift a hand to him. Because _someone_ , someone who used to be your best friend, who used to pull you into embraces because you brought him comfort, someone who you used to take care of and feed without him asking just because you fucking _cared_ about him, went into this exchange with Dave with the full and conscious intention of hurting him. Or worse.

You can feel your blood boiling. You’re mad. You’re mad at Gamzee. You’re mad at Terezi for luring Dave to him without meaning to. You’re mad at fucking Dave for being stupid enough to throw himself into round two and you’re mad at yourself for feeling so fucking relieved that he’s standing right in front of you now, still breathing.

You move closer and reach a hand out to tentatively trace your fingers along a darkening patch of skin on his back. His movements freeze, and he half-turns to look at you.

“I’m fine, man,” he reassures you and you know he’s fine, but you still can’t seem to get over the idea that he COULD be in pieces right now, and he’s not. He’s not. He’s whole and he’s moving and he’s just… alive. 

You burrow yourself against his chest, ignoring his protesting grunt of discomfort, snaking your arms around his waist and holding onto him maybe a little too tightly but _jesus fuck_ you are feeling a hell of a lot of things right now and you’re still not entirely used to it. 

“You are such _prick_ ,” you murmur heatedly and you’re sure you’re probably hurting him a little because he’s so beaten up but you can’t help it. Trolls are compulsive and act out on instinct. You’re just giving in to what nature is pushing you to do. “You are so fucking _stupid_.”

He isn’t complaining, though. He doesn’t even seem to care that you sound mad at him. You feel his chest expand under your face as he sighs. His hands come up to rest on your shoulders.

“I’m young,” he says softly. “It’s socially acceptable for me to make as many mistakes as I possibly can before I turn thirty.”

“I don’t care, just don’t make _that_ one a third time,” you reply, lifting your head to glare at him.

“Aw, come on,” he half-grins back at you. “I feel funny leaving things at two. I feel like my life is more well-rounded when I do stupid shit _three_ times in a row before I stop.”

You pull back the slightest bit. “You better be kidding, Strider.”

“You’re, like, seriously, cripplingly worried about me, aren’t you?”

Understatement. “I am not _worried_ ,” you outright lie. “I’m _mad_ at you, you have no fucking regard for anything anyone else is feeling around you and it’s disrespectful, Dave, it makes me _angry_.”

“Hey.” He finally gets his arms around you and it shuts you up real nice and fucking fast. You didn’t realize how badly you’ve wanted that until it actually happens. “You don’t need to be angry, bro, don’t go all fuzzball on me now, everything’s fine. I’ve taken worse beatings and I don’t have any plans to go up against the vent monster on my own in the near future. Okay?”

You keep trying to glare at him but his eyes are sucking you in and you’re not actually mad, you’re just feeling very over-protective. The two feelings are strikingly similar, in a lot of ways.

“…fine,” you concede, the frustration melting out of you far too easily to be normal or healthy. “Fucking… whatever, fine.”

He grins a little wider like he just won a goddamn prize and tightens his hold on you and you’re suddenly compelled by something unexpected and powerful to reach up, take his face in your hands, and rise onto your toes a little to push a kiss against his lips.

It’s chaste, quick, but there’s something _about_ it that socks you right in the fucking stomach. You only pull back a little, and when you open your eyes to look at him, he’s looking right the fuck back at you with his own eyes half-lidded.

You go in for another one, and this one is prolonged, far from chaste or quick. This one is slow, heavy and deep, fueled by the desire to push across to him that his recklessness doesn’t just affect him; it affects the people who care about him and fuck it, yes, you absolutely do care about him. You’re not about to pass up the opportunity to show it, either, and since words will never fucking come out the way you want them too (because they _never do_ ), you’ll just have to settle showing him with your mouth and your hands and your body, instead. And you are unapologetically okay with that.

You do everything that feels natural, throwing your previous embarrassments and reservations out the fucking window – you trace his cheekbones with your thumbs, mindful enough to avoid putting too much pressure on the swelling taking over the right side, you trace his teeth with your tongue and you make yourself remember how to properly breathe through your nose. You are sure that you could be better at this, but he doesn’t seem to mind with the way he’s now cradling you and hitching his breaths and yes, this is what you wanted, _this_ is what’s making you feel better about everything.

It doesn’t take long for the intensity to spike and suddenly you’re grabbing at one another, kissing hard, knicking lips with teeth and not giving a shit, groaning in soft, short huffs into each other’s mouths and it is fucking _glorious_ , feeling him unravel against you the same way you’re unraveling against him. There are no sides and nothing is unrequited. This is all just you, and him, and the mutual needs that are screaming to be met. You, and him, and suddenly, your back against his mattress.

His hands are wandering the second he gets settled over you and you let them, stretching and arching yourself into the palms of them as they travel, using your own hands to clumsily and sloppily undress yourself from the waist up, just to feel more of that skin-to-skin contact. If the structure of your anatomy has ever weirded him out, now would be the time for him to say something. He doesn’t, though, and somehow that makes you fall even fucking harder for him. Your ribcage isn’t built like his. Your spine is more prominent. Your hipbones are more squared. To him, you have an alien’s body, and he is making it clear that he doesn’t care, just like you don’t care about his. There is nothing holding you back anymore. Mentally, you are in the right place. Emotionally and physically, you feel like you could burst wide fucking open at any moment.

You push that energy into him, draping your arms over his shoulders, fingers kneading across his back, shifting your hips when you feel him undoing your jeans and allowing him, unabashedly, to strip them off.

There’s a moment when he pulls away from your lips and looks down between you, and you have to shove your self-consciousness back because you will be _damned_ if you let something like physical shyness get in the way of this. Instead, you watch his face and hold your ground and when he finally starts moving those hands again (despite the fact that he jerks back reflexively at the initial touch and you growl out “God it’s not going to fucking bite you Dave just touch it already”) it’s like fucking _sunshine_ , it feels so good.

Once he’s over the initial road bump he falls back into it again, covering your neck with wet kisses and occasionally trying to suck a little (you hiss “cut it out” every time but he goes back to doing it anyway, oh well) and the warmth of his hand is perfect, it’s _perfect_ , you have never let another person do this to you before and part of you is furious that you waited this long for the experience and the other part is glad you waited until Dave came along and violently shook your entire foundation.

There’s pressure at the base of your spine that begins to burn and build but before you can really focus on it and start bringing it to some kind of fruition, he stops.

You feel like crying.

“Oh my god _why_ ,” you keen angrily instead, but then you feel a finger tracing your nook curiously and you get it.

“I’m not freaked out, it’s cool, I’m just…” He looks down again. This time,he involuntarily licks his lips and while you know it’s just a habitual thing, totally not intentional at all, you have never been more turned on in your entire life.

His finger traces you a second time and there's a little more pressure behind it. “Does that even feel good? Am I doing the right thing, here?”

“For the love of the _fucking matriorb_ , if you don’t stop teasing me like this I am probably going to end up fucking killing you.”

He takes that, accurately, as a yes. Something switches on in his tiny brain and he suddenly knows exactly what he should be doing.

He spends the next twenty minutes or so reminding you what it feels like to have something inside of you, a sensation that you have felt before, but self-inflicted and not nearly as intense. The first push of his hand is a little strange, but the second, third, fourth, fifth all bleed into each other and turn that burning in your spine up a few hundred fucking notches. You don’t think you’ve ever been so openly and loudly aroused before, groaning, gasping, cursing at him because it feels _that damn good_ and he’s got this look on his face whenever you manage to crack your eyes open like he is just barely able to hold himself back. You very quickly get to a point where you don’t WANT him to anymore, and by the time you are about ready to voice that, it’s like he reads your mind. He pushes his mouth against the crook of your neck, his hand moving quickly and steadily now, breathing across your skin with a rasping, straining kind of voice, “Should we… I kinda want…”

“Do it,” you snap back immediately, and that’s more than enough for him.

It starts out so awkward because it's clear that his body is still very sore and he's stubbornly determined to stay on top of you. He tries to ask you about a 'condom' (you clearly don't know what the fuck that means and when he explains it as a little rubber pail that human males wear over their genitals to prevent pregnancies or diseases you officially think that humans are the dumbest creatures you've ever heard of in your life) but you could not give a shit less about either of those because you are not a human female and also the last thing on your mind at the end of the world is if he could possibly be contaminated with something when he's obviously never done this before. So you firmly tell him to stop talking while hitching your legs up over his hips to give him some incentive and he laughs a little but he listens to you.

It's hard to focus on adjusting to him because at this point, he's pushing his overextended muscles to their limits. He's breathing a little too hard and his arms are trembling wildly, so after a few seconds of watching him struggle to maintain not only his composure but his sapped physical strength, you get frustrated and push him off of you. The dejected look on his face _instantly_ makes you feel fucking guilty, but you remedy the situation by moving closer again, getting your legs around the outsides of his thighs and settling yourself in his lap. This seems to make him feel better.

The push in is much easier this time because now _you_ have the control, and while you'd like to say that you have the kind of self-restraint that can draw this out slowly, you can tell as you start setting a rhythm that it will be an absolute fucking impossibility. 

Putting yourself in a more authoritative role seems to have revitalized the protective ache in your chest that you felt when he first started undressing, and the slow and calculated lifts and drops in his lap very soon turns to your legs wrapped around his waist, moving in desperate, clumsy unison with his battered body, your hands up in the hair at the back of his head (careful even in your mindlessness not to mess with his makeshift head bandage) and your forehead against his. Your eyes are open because you like watching what you do to him, you like the parting of his lips and the way his jaw moves. 

Several times, you both need to slow down and stop one another because it's too much too fast and neither of you seem experienced enough to keep yourselves in check. It feels like he needs to stop more often than you do and you get more and more irritated because your bodies fall out of sync with each other when it happens and he's making it happen way too much for your taste. It finally gets to a point where he tells you to stop and you pointedly do not because you're ready, you're SO ready, the heat in your groin and the pressure below your abdomen are getting to be too much and you _want_ the release.

So, instead of stopping or slowing this time, you move faster, ride him harder, and you've never seen him look so fucking shocked and terrified in all the years of knowing him. He totally wasn't expecting this out of you and the knowledge of that sends you into the greatest and most satisfying sexual build-up. You have the privilege of watching him break first; he falls backwards onto his elbows and groans loudly toward the ceiling and you ride it out, shaking with restraint, because you need to see the entire picture before your coherency is snatched away from you. His body is long and lean and his chest is heaving and the tendons in his neck are standing out, and you are _breathless_ because he is the most beautiful thing you've ever laid eyes on. When he starts to shudder at the tail end of it and shakily whispers your name, it hits you so hard that you nearly black out from the force of it; it rips you apart and leaves you gathering him back into you for something to fucking hold onto and stabilize yourself with.

He has absolutely ruined you.

You pull away from one another and collapse side by side on the rumpled, soiled sheets and you once again give into instinct, curling up closer to him, winding a possessive arm around his waist, not giving a damn how sticky the two of you are with each of your bodily fluids (and how disgusted you'll inevitably be upon waking, if you fall asleep without cleaning up first) because you're tired and you're _satisfied_ and he looks blown out of his fucking mind, which is a pretty huge victory for you.

"Do you think you have a concussion?" you slur after a few moments of listening to your breathing slow down together.

"Nah," he breathes. "or if I did, prob'ly over it now."

"Mm." You push a kiss to his shoulder. Even after all that, and all of the frustration preceding it, you still can't seem to get enough of him. Your body feels like it weighs a thousand pounds. 

"If I sleep a little I'll be all good by the time I wake up."

"Mm," you repeat, because you're only half-listening. The world is going soft and fuzzy around you already. You're doing an awful lot of sleeping around Dave lately; he apparently has a knack for finding different ways to destroy your fear-induced insomnia. 

Fine by you. 

You could do with a little peace and contentment for a change.


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> swiggity swagger have a long-coming confrontation that's taken a story and a half to culminate.
> 
> * * *

Watching Dave eat is horrifying.

_Horrifying_.

Twice now you’ve watched a wet particle of food spring from his incessantly flapping mouth and land on the table _way_ too close to you, and both times the hairs on the back of your neck prickled up. Something about partially eaten food sicks you way the fuck out. It doesn’t matter whose mouth it comes from, not even Dave’s. 

In that same vein, it amazes you how much and little your attitude has changed toward him, simultaneously. You never thought that intimacy _actually_ had that much of an effect on people, and you suppose maybe for some, it doesn’t. You’re one of those sorry, hopeless romantic sad sacs, though, and you probably should have seen this coming from the start. On one hand, he’s still annoying and he still talks too much, and he’s still kind of vile in that implacable human-male sort of way. On the other, you can tolerate the annoyance because you know that he likes you, you can use new and exciting ways to shut him up, and despite the whole ‘being vile’ thing, next to the smile and the freckles and the way his nostrils flare when he’s trying not to laugh too hard or too loud, you can sort of just brush all of the bullshit aside. Somehow, in the span of one night, you can much more easily pinpoint the good things about him than the bad.

Finding world-moving serenity in the observations of Dave’s deplorable eating habits. Only _your_ life could be so ass-backwards.

He’s talking about the time he and John tried to “Skype” for the first time but it didn't work because John's computer sucked (you don’t bother to tell him that “Skype” isn’t a thing, what the fuck, but you don’t feel like hearing an explanation right now) and you’re admittedly not really listening to him. You’re not hungry so you passed on eating – not that you’d have much of an appetite watching Dave’s spectacle, honestly – so now you’re stuck spending that awkward ‘morning after’ phase with him, slumped along the table and occasionally shifting because god _damn_ are you sore around your hips.

"I'm getting the feeling," he says (AFTER swallowing his current mouthful, thank fuck). "that you're not as deliriously interested in this story as I was hoping you'd be.”

"What gave you that idea," you reply blandly.

He shrugs. "Lover's intuition?"

And there go the fucking ears. Why do your EARS blush, it is literally the dumbest thing about you and that's a pretty tall compliment considering the way you treat yourself.

"Ha ha," you mumble, then lean a little more over the table, hushing up your voice to a loud whisper. "I wouldn't use that word so fucking candidly when your matesprit is probably hanging around nearby – who, in case you forgot, has _heightened hearing_. You really don't always _have_ to be a pretentious dirtbag, you know. Also, I feel guilty enough. Don't really need more of it, thanks."

He arches an eyebrow at you over his new pair of replacement shades. "Uh what."

"I know I didn't stutter just now."

"Dude, you really think I would have done that if I didn't already know that my relationship had gone to shit?"

Your turn to shrug. “I never know with humans, I’m just as fucking confused over your twisted romantic ideals as you are over ours.”

“I wouldn’t do that.” He sounds put-off. “Okay? That whole thing is… pretty much over. Fell apart, collapsed, done and done.”

Your posture stiffens instantly. You open your mouth, then shut it and lean even further over the table with raised, surprised eyebrows.

“Why the hell do you even look shocked, man? I told you she was with the clown, wasn’t that enough incentive for me to cut it off and cauterize it right then and there?”

“You’re… not matesprits anymore? Uh… boyfriend, girlfriend, whatever?”

“Nope. I still don’t like the idea of the black-romance-threeway thing in general, but I’ll be fucked if I even _try_ to consider it when the clown is involved.”

You’re actually speechless. You feel ten times lighter as the guilt unexpectedly lifts right off of you.

“You’re still looking at me all crazy with your mouth open. You alright, buddy? Need to lay down?” He suddenly grins. “Need me to lay down _with_ you? ‘Lay’ being used very loosely? ‘Loose’ being used very suggestively?”

Your face is starting to feel as hot as your ears have been this whole time and it’s not because you’re flustered. “This whole time I’ve been fucking worried about how to deal with intruding in on someone’s matespritship...”

“Nah, it’s been going south for awhile. She kinda like, stopped talking to me about stuff and I got the feeling that she was hiding something. I just had to go and find out that it was true in the worst fucking way possible, is all. So no worries, you aren’t intruding on anything. You had me all to yourself last night, bro.”

Sweetest fucking music you have _ever_ heard.

“Glad to know that nothing is weird or… you know,” you say quietly, and immediately want to ram your forehead into the table for how stupid and mushy it sounds, _wow_ Vantas.

He snorts. “Look at what we’ve all done and seen and been through up until this point, dude. I have brought on the end of the world with my buddies totally by accident, I’ve _died_ and gained crazy superpowers for it, I’ve figured out how to make several million fucking clones of myself as a result of said superpowers and had all of _them_ die and I felt when they did and that part REALLY sucked, I watched my _brother_ die and now apparently he’s been reincarnated as some other douchebag from an alternate timeline, I’ve gone on a crazy frog breeding adventure with a witch who is also my friend and can do pretty much _anything she fucking wants_ at this point, and the end-game frog through a series of even MORE fucking oddball events brought us to this point and now we’re on a meteor hurdling through space and the occasional dream bubble to get to another world so we can defeat a big old bad guy and start life over. And that’s MISSING a few fucking things.” He tips his glasses down and looks at you over them. “Having sex with a guy I like is one of the most normal things I’ve done in years. Even though the guy just happens to be part of an alien species. With no strictly gender-defining sexual organs. Whatever. Nuance. Still pretty damn normal in comparison.”

He may be a pain in the ass on the best of days and he’s not the most tactful person you know, but Dave Strider is, as of right now, the best thing that’s ever happened to you.

The level of flushed that you have reached by this point could be considered catastrophic.

“So…” you say through a stubborn smile that will NOT go away. “…in that case, if she’s not your matesprit anymore, would you… be willing to consi—“

“Dave? Karkat? Are you two down here?”

The voice from the hallway unmistakably belongs to Rose, and although you’re MORE than a little frustrated by your proverbial flame being very abruptly snuffed out for now, her tone sounds like she means business.

“Kitchen,” Dave calls back, his face aimed toward the corner, his posture relaxed and casual though you can tell that he has his rapt attention aimed solely on the voice of his littermate. Just in case.

You twist around in time to see her appear at the corner, and you’re expecting her to look frantic but she just looks a little harried. That, at least, is minutely comforting.

“There's a big dream bubble coming.” You almost wonder how she senses shit like this, but stop yourself upon remembering that she can probably sense basically everything. “This one might be immeasurably important. I suggest that you both think about getting to your rooms and knocking yourselves out for a little while.”

“You really think it’s gonna be THAT important?” Dave asks. He doesn’t sound skeptical, just intrigued.

She smirks at him a little. “You’re questioning my judgment?”

“I thought that was every brother’s job.”

She withdraws without responding and leaves. You turn around and Dave is looking at you with his lips pressed together like he’s probably just as disappointed that this conversation was interrupted as you are.

When you take the trek back in the direction of Dave’s room, you’re walking closely with your arms brushing, keeping the pace slow. There’s no question that something has drastically changed in your dynamic with Dave and it’s something that can never be reversed. Not that you _want_ it reversed, mind. As close as you were to asking him only minutes ago if he’s serious about this or just fooling around, you’re almost content with the idea that there are just some things that might need to stay unspoken between you. You don’t need words; he annoys the shit out of you when he talks, anyway. 

You stop in front of his door and face each other and it’s like in one of Dave’s stupid human movies when the romantic leads have just gone on a formal date and are finished, waiting for one to invite the other inside for the night. What’s funny is that you actually don’t want him to leave you the option because you know you can’t, anyway. But the asshole actually does it. 

“So…” he says, drawing out the ‘o’. “You wanna maybe do this in my room or something? I always have a hard time making myself fall asleep when I’m not really ready to, you know?” He sounds sly. “Having someone else there might help. Intense moral support REALLY tires me out.”

You half-lid your eyes disbelievingly at him. “Are you sure that’s the only reason you’re inviting me back in?”

He’s trying not to smile. “What do you take me for, some kind of giant pervert?”

“Absolutely,” you quip back without hesitation.

He’s STILL trying not to smile, but it’s really not working. The corners of his lips are twitching with his vain attempts to smother it back down. “That hurts, bro, I’m as gentle and as pure as freshly fallen snow.”

You still don’t really get what snow is, but there’s a flash through your mind of Dave underneath you from the night before, leaning back, face pinched, hips working up against you in short, hard, desperate juts.

“I can’t even respond to that with decent sarcasm, it’s such a big fucking lie,” you respond flatly. Your body is now sorely tempted to stay even though your brain is telling you that it’s not the best idea.

“Seriously, dude,” he says, but his voice softens and he’s stepping in closer to you and you can smell him and _fuck your life_. “Stay, yeah?”

“I can’t,” you mumble guiltily. “If this bubble is as big and important as Rose says it is, I need to be _completely_ asleep. I can’t chance sleeping lightly for something like this.”

“Ohh, so you need the goo.”

You smirk crookedly, because sex apparently turns imbecilic traits into endearing ones, how the hell does that work. “Yes, Dave, I need the goo.”

“A’right, fine, I guess I can live with that.” He takes a step away and you hate it, but it is what it is. Potential quadrant material aside, you both still have jobs to do and you’re both still involved in a really fucking complicated situation right now. Relationships teach people all the wrong things, in your opinion; that it’s okay to be constantly distracted, that letting your guard down is a good idea, that implicit trust is actually a good thing…

You stiffen your spine resolutely. 

“See you in there, maybe,” you say. You sound awkward.

He reaches behind him for his door handle and misses once. You feel much better about being awkward.

“Yep.”

You turn and start walking toward your own room, because the longer you stare at him the harder it’ll be to actually remove yourself from his presence.

 

-  -  -

 

The thing you dislike the most about dream bubbles is the confusing familiarity you tend to feel while you’re in one. You’ve never been a particularly big fan of leaving your own ‘safe space’ so to speak – you’re surprisingly private for someone so outspoken, admittedly – and when big bubbles like this come along you always find yourself thrown into surroundings that you’ve never seen before, yet recognize almost instantly. It’s a _really_ fucking uncomfortable sensation, to be totally knowledgeable and totally clueless at the same time.

You remember what happened the last time a really big bubble came along. It was a free-for-all generational shitshow. You’d gotten the chance to meet _your_ dancestor (who was, for the record, an irritating little asshole and you can only be thankful that you didn’t wind up like him) along with a few others, you seized the opportunity to have a pretty inconclusive conversation with Terezi, and you confused yourself _utterly_ over your interactions with the stupid ebubbles that Dave scattered all over the place for shits and fucking giggles. It was overall a necessary experience, but it wasn’t exactly what you’d call a fulfilling or enjoyable one.

As it turns out, this one initially appears to be a fluke. 

You’re back in the old Alternian neighborhood and it’s just as hard for you to overcome the sad, nostalgic feelings now as it was a year ago. It’s the whole unfamiliar familiarity thing at play again – you have never seen this particular neighborhood before, you know that deep down as a fact, but you simultaneously feel like you could have grown up here. You aren’t sure why the bed (not the pile of horns that you’d been initially expecting, thankfully) you woke up on in the bubble is in the middle of a building’s desolate and quiet front yard, but dream bubbles are fucking funny like that. They’ll spit you out wherever they damn well please at the time.

You know the drill by now; you get up, and you walk. And you walk, and you fucking walk. You know that your fellow meteor inhabitants are around somewhere, but for the time being you’re alone. You try the building before moving on, but all of the doors are intricately locked, requiring a series of complicated keys that are no doubt a gigantic pain in the ass to obtain. You aren’t really up for playing games, so you think _fuck it_. If you miss something valuable, oh well. You haven’t been one to care about picking up dream bubble loot from the start, anyway.

The path you’re following winds through the eerily empty neighborhood leading out toward a forest – in the opposite direction of Terezi’s, if you remember correctly – and it seems to take fucking forever to feel like you’re even halfway there. You learned that, unfortunately, there is a great deal of trusting your instincts no matter how shitty they are when it comes to navigating bubbles. 

Your instincts just happens to be taking you into an ominous cavern of dark trees, all by your fucking self.

_Lucky me_ , you think dryly, reaching out to slap an idle dave_ebubble that’s coming up on your side.

“laptops don’t need cozies,” it informs you unhelpfully in response, and you flip it off on your way by.

The closer you get to the forest the more threatened you start to feel, and you can seriously just see it play out so stereotypically – you can see yourself entering the forest, getting deeper and deeper until there’s no more ethereal light peeking through the trees and everything is just black. You can see something dangerous and invisible is stalking you, probably from the trees, watching every single one of your movements and keeping up with your slow footfalls, just waiting for you to drop your guard for even a second…

Isn’t it stupid that being ambushed and attacked by something unexpectedly is still a legitimate fear of yours? Considering your situation, you should be way over that by now.

You move quietly and carefully, knowing well enough to constantly keep an eye trained upward and not just straight ahead. You’re still a pretty good distance from the mouth of the forest, which is almost comforting because if anything is going to happen, it’s going to happen in there, where it’s dark and enclosed, right?

Wrong.

Instead, you see a figure slowly pull its way out of the shadows of the woods and stand in the center of your path at the entrance of them, blocking your way in and staring you down with a tall, straight posture and a featureless, shrouded face. You can tell who it is without needing to see the face. You can tell that this time, it’s not just intimidation. There is going to be a confrontation here, whether you fucking want it or not.

And maybe you do want it. Maybe this is the way to finally get what you want out of him. All the hiding out and ignoring and neglecting got really fucking old, and maybe this is officially your chance for some closure. Now that you have him in your sights, you think about how his behaviour toward you has negatively affected you. You think about his manipulation on Terezi and the fact that he was able to win her over so easily after you’d had such a hard fucking time over the years. 

You think about the marks and the bruises that Dave came back to you with the night before.

Your sickles are out and in your hands. After only a moment’s pause and the flexing of two long-fingered hands, he pulls out his own weapons, still caked with the dried gore of people you used to call your friends.

You take a breath. You step forward.

Enough is enough.


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> in which Karkat whoops'es all over everything.
> 
> * * *

As with most things that you encounter head-on, you go into this not knowing what to expect. 

In true Troll fashion, you are allowing yourself to work almost solely on basic instinct instead of thinking about the rationality behind your actions. It’s a habit that you used to embody only to a certain extent, but have been practicing a little more ritualistically after spending so much time around humans. It’s sometimes hard to remember that there are stark differences between you and them, but the reminder comes pretty fucking fast when you’re pitted up against a situation like this.

You know that you’re a good fighter. Despite the inevitability of rejection due to your mutation, you really _did_ want to be a Threshecutioner once and had actually made it a goal of yours to train up to the task. You’re not sure if you were just fooling yourself like an idiot or what – maybe you were hoping by some _motherfucking miracle_ that if they saw just how good you could fight and how strong you could be regardless of your size or height, they would be willing to just fucking flippantly ignore the colour of your blood. Whatever the case, now seems to be good a time as any to see if your attention to Troll combat (never mind humans, holy shit, they are so unpredictable when they fight, it’s a whole different story there) would even pay off of not.

The main obstacle here is that Gamzee is just as fucking unpredictable as humans are. He’s _more_ unpredictable. He’s unhinged and he’s fast, so it doesn’t take long for you to see how he could have so easily beaten Dave, who had kept up with _you_ perfectly when you strifed, into the fucking floor like it was nothing.

So far, you have rushed him four times and he’s batted you aside effortlessly with each attempt. Twice he’s used his full body weight to knock you off-track, once he’s managed to snag one of his horns into the fabric of your shirt and throw off your balance (effectively tearing the shirt, too, what a fucking _asshole_ ), and the fourth time utilizes one of his juggling clubs, sweeping it hardinto your abdomen. That one sucks because it knocks all of the wind clear out of you and you find yourself on your ass yet again, this time unable to breathe. It’s the first shot he’s taken at you that has actually caused you any sort of physical pain, though, which you think about as you attempt to drag more air into your lungs.

“ _Coward_ ,” you hiss out at him as you reach out for the sickles you dropped, slowly picking yourself off of the ground. “You fucking _coward_.”

He doesn’t outwardly react to you. You don’t like that. You used to be the only one who could actually get through to him and now, things have disintegrated so much that he regards you in the same blank, emotionless way that he extends toward everyone else. There’s no creepy smile. There’s no relaxation in his stance. He is a slab of stone to you, now, and he sure as hell isn’t trying to hide it.

Once you’re on your feet, unsteady but upright, you take a few more deep, deep breaths and move a step forward again. You wish he would show something – surprise. Anger. Shit, anywhere on the spectrum between contempt and guilt, anything, _something_ to show you that you are still above the line, the way you had been before. As crazy as it sounds, you are fucking _terrified_ of getting on his bad side because the only thing that actually protected you back when he first snapped was the fact that you had a specific power over him. You had that spark in you, something he responded to and was able to see through his cloud of red. It was something that turned you into his moirail that night, instead of another splatter of blood on his clothing.

With that gone, what’s stopping him from killing you right here, right now?

And why the fuck would he wait until you were in a dream bubble to do it? To get the deed done, mess and all, where nobody can see it, so you’re just there and dead when everyone wakes up? _That’s_ a scary prospect. You instantly regret thinking about that.

Another step. Still nothing from him.

It makes you angry. There is nothing more frustrating than trying to drag any kind of emotion out of someone who refuses to give it up. This is why Dave used to piss you off so much, because those fucking glasses always gave him this false anonymity that made him impossible to read. Not being able to read your adversary makes fighting properly with them impossible. Right now, you can’t read Gamzee for the fucking life of you.

You plan on taking another step but that step turns into a series of them as you lose your temper and start rushing him again. You’re sure you’re making a noise, maybe even talking to (yelling at) him, but you’re in one of those blinding moments when all you can focus on is the blood in your ears, the bright pounding behind your eyes, and the constriction in your chest. 

You raise both of your sickles and swing them down in an arc. There is barely a twitch in his fucking expression as his own weapons come up and effectively block the blow of yours.

He uses the leverage of your weapons getting caught on his to wrench you to the side, throwing you off balance yet again and sending you sprawling out over the floor. You land directly on one hip and while you’ve experienced more painful endeavors before in your time it still _really_ fucking sucks. You managed to keep hold of one of the sickles, clenched stubbornly in your left hand, but the other one is still hooked and hanging, swinging slightly, over the body of his club.

You really didn’t want to leave anything sharp in Gamzee’s possession, but as always, life just isn’t working out the way it should be for you.

You roll yourself defensively into a crouch, ignoring the loud frowning of disapproval coming from the afflicted hip, and watch as he turns to face you fully, shifting his club in a subtle, continuous motion. Your sickle responds to the movement like a slow, upside-down pendulum. The handle is right there pointed toward the ground, tempting you to approach it and grab hold of it. The option IS right there, and it IS feasible, but you have to get through _him_ , first. He’s already hurt you twice – once directly, and once indirectly. Both were defensive maneuvers to get you away from him. You are tiptoeing an incredibly fine line; you still can’t tell if he’s out to get you now, or if what he’s doing is just protecting himself from your sharpened blades and nothing more.

Out of sheer desperation to find at least a _little_ bit of sanity left in his burnt-out, overexposed brain, you try to think that maybe it’s the latter, seeing as he could have gotten at least three or four good, clear shots to your head so far and he hasn’t seized the opportunity. And you stick with that twisted, rose-coloured hope until you watch him calmly and methodically tuck his unoccupied club under an arm and slowly wind his long fingers around the handle of your sickle, removing it from its perch, officially adopting it as his own.

_Now_ you’re probably fucked. 

Doing your best to brush off the stress it puts on the side that you’ve been knocked violently down onto twice, you force yourself back up onto your feet. The more he bats you aside like a fucking insect, the angrier you feel and the more his recently accumulating neglect starts to come to a head.

“Why?” you hear yourself spitting at him. “What could I possibly have fucking done to you to make you forget that I’m even fucking around?”

No response, but were you honestly really expecting one?

“What did I do,” you keep going, _fuck_ knows why. “to put myself on the same level as all the other stupid shitheads that you killed before the Scratch happened?”

You finally get something. It’s a little something, but it’s something. The slight twitch of the lips. The almost unnoticeable rise along one corner of his caked, paint-smeared mouth.

You almost wish he hadn’t responded at all.

“You wanna know what you did?” he asks you softly, but when he speaks again, his voice darkens considerably – you can’t figure out if it’s better or worse than passing between quiet and screaming the way he did before you established one another as moirails. “You wanna know what you _motherFUCKING_ did?”

Your hand tightens on the handle of your sickle instinctively.

“It’s not about what you _did_ , friend,” he croons, and it sucks because he sounds just like he used to, when you thought that maybe there was a small, glimmering hope of a chance that he was starting to actually calm down for good. He takes a step closer to you and you have to physically ground yourself to prevent from shrinking back. Adding insult to injury would be pretty fucking stupid right now, he can practically fucking smell it when people do that. 

“It’s about what you _didn’t motherfucking do_.”

The intermittent screaming was definitely worse, you decide, but that doesn’t mean that you particularly enjoy the sound of the growl that comes out of him with every other sentence considering how much damage you have watched him cause without batting a goddamn eye.

Your brain doesn’t really have time to drum up the right words to form any questions – you’re _really_ confused, and concerned, and freaked out because that was an incredibly cryptic response and Gamzee being cryptic can only mean trouble – because he’s closing in on you, still holding your sickle in his hand, still wearing _that smile_ , and how the fuck are you supposed to even function properly when everything in you is abandoning the Fight or Flight mindset and urging you to get the fuck out of the situation, _now_.

He only stops when he’s mere fucking inches from you, looming over you ominously, the shadows moving across his face painting a portrait of actual, fully-realized mental disconnection. You would love to kid yourself and say that the eyes you’re peering up into are still the eyes of your best friend and pale partner, but even though the face remains the same, the soul behind it has changed drastically. There isn’t a single fucking shred of the creature you cared about and took care of when everyone else ignored him, hated him, or wanted him dead. Or all of the above.

You don’t recognize the thing looking back at you.

“What didn’t I do, Gamzee?” you ask, and you’re not sure where you drummed up the fucking guts to actually speak to him but your voice is not as strong as you’d like it to be, really you sound sort of like a frightened, quivering little grub and you feel like one, too.

You only wish you could put into words just how quickly that fright blossoms into pure terror when he calmly lifts the hand holding your sickle and, with perfect precision, brings it in close, knicking the angle of your jaw on one side with the sharpened tip.

You jump. Of course you jump. You aren’t expecting it to happen and unexpected physical interaction has never been a strong suit of yours. There’s no pain, at first. The blade is too sharp for that. You DO feel the subsequent cooling wetness on the area pretty quickly, though, and you can tell that you’re bleeding by the way his eyes lower to it with what you can only read as rapt fascination.

Bleeding, in any normal Alternian circumstance, would probably result in your immediate culling. With Gamzee and the way he’s apparently been fucking operating lately, you almost feel like that could still be the case.

Even with that cold hand of fear tingling along your spine, you stay completely still as he reaches out, tracing gentle fingers along the now-slightly-stinging wound, and withdraw his hand to peer down at the red streaked across them.

“Just like his,” he says softly, more to himself than to you. His eyes flick up to yours and a chill runs straight fucking down through you. “Just. Like. _Motherfuckin’_. His.”

_Oh_. 

See. Now you get it. You aren’t usually the type who needs shit spelled out for you and you hate it when it has to come to that, but it’s taken you up until now to figure out that this is, and has always been to one extent or another, about Dave.

_Shit_.

You press your lips into a hard, straight line as you try to think of something to say that could possibly set this situation right, but nothing comes to mind. You know that you’re not going to get a coherent explanation out of him, he is WAY too far gone for that at this point, so you’re sort of forced to make your own assessment. You are the one who wound up making the mistake, after all; from what you can surmise (as quickly as you can manage), this is Gamzee’s way of dealing with resentment and jealousy. You had been so convinced that he was properly and permanently distracted by Terezi and so wrapped up in your own flushed protectiveness over Dave that you didn’t fucking stop to think that the room you finally succeeded in seducing him in was one containing vents that Gamzee frequented. 

You didn’t stop to think that he would still be making his rounds after Terezi was gone.

He told you to quit fucking around with Dave, and with his knowledge of the vent system it was only a matter of time before he figured out that you’d been blatantly ignoring his request.

You feel all sorts of fucking stupid, now.

_Shitshitshit_.

“Gamzee,” you say, and you’re trying to keep your voice as light and gentle as you possibly fucking can. You definitely still want to be attacking his crazy ass, that much hasn’t changed. You figure, though, that maybe a change of pace might swing the hand back into your favour.

“ _Gamz_ ,” you repeat, and you’re practically cooing his own name at him. Feels pretty disgusting. “None of this is his fault.”

He continues to stare at you, hard, expressionless, bloodied fingers still hovering between you.

“This isn’t a fight that he’s physically or emotionally equipped for. He’s too stupid to realize what he’s doing.”

“Anyone who wanders into the lion’s den,” he explains darkly. “deserves to be _motherFUCKing_ bitten.”

“You’re right,” you agree evenly, quickly, because you don’t want to give him any wiggle room to start getting worked up. “and you’ve bitten him, so to speak. Twice. Twice is enough for humans, Gamzee. He doesn’t have a reason to come back and he’s not going to.”

He curls up one corner of his mouth again.

“Who said…” He leans in closer, his thumb rubbing along the pads of his index and middle fingers, spreading the cooling, drying blood between them. “…I was talking about him?”

Your stomach lurches. You swallow involuntarily.

He grins slowly, showing his teeth to you, and lifts his hand a little higher to smear your blood across his bottom lip. His tongue snakes out to follow suit, but there’s still residue left behind in its wake, staining the make-up clogged, chapped cracks in his lip pink.

You think you might actually throw up.

“Consider us _motherfuckin’_ even, brother,” he rumbles as he leans his grin down way too close for comfort. “You got yours.” He pauses. Chuckles. The noise is beyond description. You’ve never hated anything more. “And I got mine.”

He drops your sickle and the sound of it uselessly hitting the ground makes you jump. He withdraws smoothly; you are frozen in place, a faint tremble beginning to stir in your joints, watching him disappear back into the darkness of the forest in front of you.

You suppose you could consider this the official break-up.


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> second to last chapter of this story….!!?
> 
> * * *

People would probably never take you for a particularly creative individual if they didn’t know you very well, but contrary to what your generally unlikeable demeanor may allude to others, you’d actually consider yourself artistic. In your own backwards and weird kind of way.

You can’t draw for shit – with the exception of charts or diagrams, because those are mostly straight, orderly lines; Dave is worse, though, especially since he insists on covering your hard work with crude scrawlings of human dicks, fucking douche – and you’ve never cared to venture into any mediums in the same ballpark. You’d like to think that you’re a pretty decent writer, though, and nothing you’ve ever actually physically built, whether over a template or from the ground up, has fallen apart on you before.

Writing, building, and fighting. This could technically make you useful, right? Whatever.

Dealing with a break-up in any capacity is shitty. You have learned and studied this from your books and your movies. The closest you’ve ever been to experiencing the unique sort of heartache that comes along with a severed relationship was when Terezi basically got sick and tired of your wishy-washy bullshit, and that hadn’t even technically been an official break-up because you were never fucking together to begin with. Aaaall thanks to you, by the way.

So this is your first time. Your first big severance. This is everything that you’d watched or read about with the removal of cinematic cheesiness and falsified emotions. You have gotten to feel everything first-hand, now, and frankly it’s fucking terrible.

The worst part is how _alone_ you feel. Who the fuck can you even talk to? Kanaya and Terezi have their own personal biases on Gamzee now, so you’ll be damned if you even consider leaning on either of them for any semblance of comfort. _Especially_ not Terezi, that relationship is too new and way too complicated to touch.

In addition to that, none of the humans _get_ pale relationships and none of them could possibly fucking understand the tiny, delicate little differences between ending a friendship with a best friend and _breaking up_ with one. Friendships are not technically romances in their culture, so no, fuck that, you’ve explained it too many goddamn times and you are not willing to go at it again when you feel like the entire universe just took a gigantic shit right on top of you.

The only one you _really_ want to see right now is Dave, but at the same time also you sort of want to keep your distance for a little while. Dave is a generally nice guy, you suppose (if you can get around the immaturity, the ignorance, the stupidity, etc.) but he’s also kind of a loose cannon when it comes to emotions. _Extremely_ hot and cold. One minute he’s sympathetic and playing the role of a fantastic listener. The next, he’s taking advantage of the tiny chink in your armour, loudly and brashly exposing it in a way that you’re _sure_ he thinks is funny but only makes _you_ fucking defensive and insecure. There may be people out there somewhere who genuinely don’t give a fuck about being made fun of. You’re not one of them.

That said, you’re depressed and you want to make something. Building shit usually makes you feel better.

You wait around in your room for a little while after you wake up, just in case Dave is planning on coming by. After about an hour of nothing, you figure he’s either still asleep or dealing with his own bullshit right now, get dressed, and head to the only place that you’re _sure_ you’ll find some materials, specifically for something small.

The only one you’re expecting to see around right now is predictably there when you round the corner from the kitchen. You’re not quite sure what he does with himself a lot of the time – it’s hard to sneak up on him because it’s like the moment he hears footsteps, he immediately stops whatever he’s doing. Every single damn time you’ve bothered to come by Can Town, you’re greeted with the exact same image: a fucking disaster area of cans and chalk and the Mayor standing somewhere in the midst of it all, fully facing the corner with his fingers steepled in front of him expectantly.

You realize as you stop at the entrance of the room and see him standing there, watching you, that you still aren’t sure how the fuck to confront him face-to-face without someone else there.

There’s a long, long moment of silent staring from the both of you.

“Hi,” you offer, finally.

He lifts one of his hands and waggles his fingers at you in greeting.

“Um. I need a few things.”

He blinks at you and takes a quick glance around himself.

“Not cans,” you clarify.

He stops looking around. His hands go back to their original steepling position.

“I’m trying to build something. Something small. I need…” You form your own hands into cups and place one over the other, making an oval kind of shape with your fingers. “…plastic or something, in this kind of shape. And maybe…” You create a small measurement of space between your index finger and thumb. “…a few more like this length?” Holy fuck you sound so stupid. “And, uh. Paint maybe.”

The Mayor blinks at you again. You’re trying very, very hard not to feel uncomfortably awkward and it’s not really working. His fingers tap together a few times. You are guessing that this is the way he thinks because he can’t make idle noises with his mouth. Does he even have a mouth? You don’t fucking know. Carapacians, right?

He finally turns away from you to look around the room behind him. You slump against the doorframe while his back is to you and let out a long breath because you always go into these rare moments thinking that conversing with someone who doesn’t fucking talk back is going to be a breeze, never remembering just how hard it actually is trying to squeeze a discussion out of incredibly limited facial expressions ( _does he even have a whole face though_ ) and gestures.

You watch as he wanders around Can Town, gingerly stepping over buildings and scrawled streets, craning his neck around to presumably see if any of the debris littering the town itself and the room in general would compare to what you’ve described to him. That’s what you’re hoping he’s doing, at least.

He winds up actually _scouring_ that fucking room for you, to your surprise, and after he’s meticulously checked from one end of Can Town to the other and back, he comes back with only a handful of slightly rounded plastic pieces that really won’t do you any good at all.

He seems a little distressed as he holds them out to you.

You take them to inspect and no, they will not be helpful. One is too small, one is cracked, and the others aren’t quite round enough, too flat to fit over the base that you plan on working off of. You don’t want to tell him this because the maybe-look on his almost-face is sorta-sad.

“Thhhaanks,” you say slowly and stiffly. “These might work for some of it.”

He seems eased and placated by that. You sigh and pop the plastic bits up into your sylladex where you will undoubtedly forget out them and then find them again a long time from now and be incredibly confused as to where they came from and why the fuck they were in there.

“Now I need to figure out the main material,” you mumble, eyes scanning across the room even though the Mayor already looked for you. “I want it to be sturdy. Something that won’t break apart if I drop it, and protect something delicate. Delicate like circuit boards.”

The two of you lapse into useless silence again as you try to think, and you come very close to just giving the fuck up and going back to your room to hide under the blankets on your couch like a sad fucking blob but the Mayor starts waving his arms to get your attention.

You look at him as he’s reaching out for your wrist. He grabs hold of it and drags you back into the kitchen. You’re not even sure how to resist properly; it’s almost like dealing with a wriggler.

He takes you to the table Rose set up for her alchemy and reaches across it to grab the long-neck gas lighter that you’ve seen her use to expedite boiling in passing before. He holds it up and clicks the trigger. The flame it produces is fucking huge.

Your eyes move from the flame to him. 

He just stands there, waiting for you to get it. 

But you don’t fucking get it. You shrug a little at him to get this across to him.

His posture deflates slightly. He removes his finger from the trigger to snuff out the flame before shoving the lighter into your hand and dragging you back into Can Town.

Maybe you should have just hung out with Dave instead. Gritting your teeth and putting up with potential idiocy with the possible reward of sex or makeouts or whatever understandably seems a lot better than being a fucking yoyo with the Mayor.

Somehow you manage to get around Can Town without kicking it apart or tripping over something and fucking hurting yourself. The Mayor takes you toward the back of the room, up to the old, dusty computer screens lining a part of the wall. 

He points at the lighter, and then at the screens. You could swear that he’s fucking beaming, somehow.

“…what?” you finally ask, because fuck your pride, you’re confused and losing your patience a little.

He takes the lighter from you, presses the trigger, and gestures it wildly at the screens. You take a small step back because the little psycho is _fucking waving fire around_.

“You want me to light these computers on fire?” 

The Mayor rolls his goddamn eyes (oh god, this has officially reached way new levels of ridiculous if this asshole is the one calling YOU fucking stupid) and jabs a finger at you. 

“You want me to light _me_ on fire?” What the actual shitting fuck.

The flame disappears from the tip of the lighter and he lowers it, staring at you flatly.

You huff irritably. “Light my OWN computer on fire? I don’t fucking know what you’re telling me to do, give me a goddamn break.”

But he perks up, suddenly, and starts nodding.

You squint at him. “…wait, was that right? You’re telling me to light my husktop on fire?”

He nods with even more enthusiasm.

Fucking whack-job, this guy. No wonder he and Dave get along so well.

“What.. the hell good is that going to do me at all? I want to build something and you’re telling me to take a lighter to a broken computer?” 

He gives you a thumbs-up.

What is that supposed to mean.

_What is that supposed to fucking mean_.

“Mayor, nothing is even going to happen. It will make a tiny bonfire. It will probably smell terrible because of the burning plastic. And it will leave me nothing with a fucking melted mess to clean up aft… er… wards…”

Something dawns on you. 

It must show on your face because the Mayor puffs out his chest proudly.

“Plastic,” you say, and almost smack yourself across your own fucking face. “That thing is a heap of scrap right now. Scrap plastic. Plastic can bend with enough heat.”

The Mayor is practically shedding a tear of happiness.

You turn on your heel to leave, but stop just before the edge of Can Town when you realize that the Mayor is excitedly following you.

You look back at him over your shoulder. He stares back. He lifts his hand and waves at you again.

“…are you coming with me?” you ask.

He nods, a bit questioningly this time.

You look at him for a longer minute. He did come up with the idea. And maybe having someone around will do your mind some good. Keep you distracted.

 

-  -  -

 

It definitely keeps you distracted.

You had no idea previously how awesome it actually is to have the Mayor around, especially when you’re in a bad mood. He possesses endless enthusiasm, he’s completely agreeable, and he doesn’t fucking talk. You wind up having to explain why you made your communicators and how it was done (without specifics, of course; Sollux didn’t bother to _explain_ anything to you while he was rudely possessing your body and using your eyes) but all he can do is nod in understanding, regardless of whether he _actually_ understands or not, because he can’t ask five thousand annoying fucking questions that you probably can’t answer a majority of, anyway.

Having the extra pair of hands is extremely helpful, too. You would most likely pitch yourself into a fit if you had to work on this for too long by yourself, considering there is a lot of cutting and sawing that needs to get done, since you're taking bigger pieces down to smaller ones very gradually. He holds, you cut, and he watches you and what you’re doing with rapt fascination. It feels really good to be looked up to for a fucking change.

You also reflect that his idea was actually legitimately pretty brilliant. The inner workings of the communicator were derived mostly from your husktop, so it makes sense that the outer shell will be, too. And you’ve decided that you’re going to make the fucking thing look like a crab, because you have the freedom to make it look however you see fit and you _damn well_ want it to be a crab. It’s your head-nod, a weird, stupid way for your Lusus to kind of be there with you when you finally reach the end of the game.

You find yourself openly explaining all of this to the Mayor without really meaning to, and unlike some other jerks that you know, he doesn’t tease you for the temporary sentimentality. He just reacts with what little of his face you can see and for some reason that helps you more than words probably could, at this point.

Just as you finish cutting down the last piece of plastic to the size that you need, the communicator crackles to life in a sharp hiss of static on the desk next to you. The Mayor jumps back a fucking foot and you snort at him.

“Hey buddy,” comes Dave’s tinny, grainy voice.

“Hey yourself,” you mutter back, picking off jagged hangnails of extra plastic around the exterior of your cut pieces.

“What’re you wearing.”

“Skin,” you reply, unamused, eyes lifting to the Mayor who is now trying not to look at you.

“Oooh, _nice_ , that's my favourite.”

“Someone else’s skin.”

“Ew.”

“I have the Mayor with me,” you inform him cooly. “I’m working on something for these devices. He’s helping me out.”

“Oh my god, seriously?” He sounds surprised. And happy. _Weirdly_ happy. “You guys are actually hanging out?”

You shoot a pointless glare at the communicator as you pluck the lighter off of the table. “Is it so surprising to you that someone wants to hang out with me?”

“No man, no way, that’s not what I meant. I’m thrilled ‘cause this means my ho and my bro are being friends and shit.”

You glance at the Mayor again. He’s nodding happily.

Dave tacks on, “It must be _precious_ , fuck, please tell me I can swing by and hang out too.”

You roll your eyes, dragging on an old pair of gloves that you’ve had hanging around on your work desk since you started this stupid project. They aren’t fire resistant but they’re at least _some_ sort of protection for your hands against hot plastic. “A,” you reply. “I’m not your fucking ‘ho’ so if you ever plan on using your genitals for anything again, you’ll think of something else to call me. And B, whatever, the Mayor is nodding so hard his head is going to fucking fall off, so I guess it’s fine if you come by.”

“Aw, nice, I owe that guy a fuckin’ fist bump.”

The Mayor does a little hop in place.

You’re surrounded.

“Just don’t talk,” you instruct him. “I’m trying to concentrate and I’ll kick you out real fucking fast if you start to get on my nerves.”

“Uh huh,” he drawls before the communicator goes dark again. His tone suggests that he is way too used to you now. The thought annoys and warms you at the same time.

He's there within minutes, just as you're about to start heating your materials, walking right in like it's his room, too, like always. It doesn't bother you as much now as it did before. You turn to look at him and he's gloriously mussed, possibly having just woken up from the latest dream bubble excursion, wearing rumpled, comfortable clothing and moving with sleep-sluggish legs.

Predictably, he leans across the tabletop to give the Mayor his expected fist bump greeting (the Mayor had his fucking hand out and ready even before Dave was fully in the room) and then hoists himself onto your desk next to you, flicking you a mock salute. "Sup."

You turn back to your work because he's good looking and that's A Problem for you right now. "Nothing."

"Tried to find you for like, _ever_ in that bubble, dude, where the hell were you?"

"Probably started out on the complete opposite side as you." You bend a piece of your plastic between your fingers, texting the elasticity of it. Surprisingly flexible, considering how durable the stuff is. 

"Yeah, probably," he agrees. His legs swing slowly; you can see the movement out of the corner of your eye. "Did anything go down? Gotta tell you that was one of the most boring fucking bubbles I've ever been in. I was dropping my ebubbles all over the fucking place for fun and even _that_ got old real fast."

"And Rose said it would be important," you gripe, effectively avoiding having to answer his question because you don't want to talk about it right now.

"I bet it was, somehow. Maybe we just missed it. I know I was too busy goofing off so." He shrugs casually. "Oh well."

"Yep," you agree, clicking the lighter's trigger. "Oh well."

You edge the flame underneath your plastic and hold it there, moving the piece slowly back and forth over it to ensure that the entire thing is covered. Dave drops the dream bubble conversation for the time being and turns his attention to the Mayor, striking up a one-sided conversation with him that you don't pay attention to.

Fortunately, the plastic does exactly what you were hoping it would. It's not thermoplastic so it's not necessarily an easy endeavor, but you came into this knowing that you would need patience, and you figure you may as well use up your week's quota just on this project alone. After a couple of heating sessions and a good deal of force, even for something small, you manage to shape your first piece of plastic into the rounded dome that you want.

Such a small feat, but you feel pretty fucking proud of yourself regardless.

You're thankful that you brought the Mayor with you because he does a fucking _fantastic_ job keeping Dave totally occupied. You only need about half an hour, maybe a little more, but they actually listen to you for a goddamn change and leave you alone until every piece you have is formed the right way. It looks like a tiny heap of randomly-shaped purple garbage right now, but you have everything mapped out in your head and all you need now is glue.

You stand up and stretch, drawing attention to you, and you wave your hand dismissively. "Ignore me, I'm still working."

"What are you making, exactly?" Dave asks from his newly-found place on your couch.

You cross the room to your toolbox and bend down to rifle through it. "A cover for my communicator. Leaving all of the wires and shit out in the open is just asking for it to break too soon."

"You gonna make one for mine, too?"

You find your tube of industrial-grade glue and grab it, scoffing haughtily as you rise back to your feet. "Hell no, I'm not making yours. Make your own."

He turns his attention to the Mayor, gesturing in your direction. "You see this? I give all my love in the world to this guy and this is what I get back."

Ah.

Well.

You sit down and avert your attention from them entirely. Your room suddenly becomes far too warm. 

That sure isn't a word that you've been at all expecting.

Best not to think on that one too much.


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thus concludes the third installment of Improvidence. I know, it’s short, but I wanted to wrap it up nice and sweet with the addition of some lovin.  
> this chapter, that said, falls into the NSFW playground for a relatively (not graphically) descriptive sex scene.  
> I do have one story left in this little series of mine, but it may take some time to work all the bugs out of it. thank you guys SO DAMN MUCH for sticking through three stories with me, holy crap. some of you have been here since the first one, and I really appreciate the dedication! even though I don’t get around to responding to comments, I do read them and every time I get a notice for one, as well as a notice for Kudos, I am like fucking _over the moon_ happy. you have no idea, it’s sad stuff man.  
>  see you soon enough in story number four! in the meantime, swing by ‘bbbbangarang.tumblr.com’ and say hello. I am not pants-pissingly interesting but I post cosplay progress and reblog a lot of stupid shit.
> 
> * * *

It’s not all that often when you are genuinely afraid of nightmares anymore, particularly because the line between reality and dream has become so blurred to you on a regular basis now that it’s pointless to fear them. You’ve only suffered through a handful of particularly awful ones over the past few years – not fucking bad, you think – and the rest have been tolerable.

The one you have tonight was not tolerable.

It’s a fucking lucid one, too. You’re not concerned that any of your dreams are precognitive in any way at all because _you’re_ not the fucking Seer, here, but they can still disturb the hell out of you, regardless. You’ve seen and done a lot since the humans’ session started (let alone since _yours_ did, inglorious shitshow that it was) so not a whole hell of a lot really actually gets to you, but throw the right ‘atmosphere’, a decently sizable amount of viscera, and your Lusus into the mix and you have yourself the perfect trauma cocktail.

You wake up shouting. You wake up because Dave is shaking you due to the shouting. Who knows how long you’d actually been trying to jar yourself out of sleep; you’re not exactly in the mood to ask.

It’s also hard to ask _anything_ when your face is being pressed into Dave’s pillow.

Hell, are you going to say no? You’re all sorts of fucked up while your mind struggles to adjust to being awake, and Dave is actually really good about it – he brings you closer to him, lets you focus on a body instead of the ghostly, still-fresh images trying to lure you back into them all over again, and talks to you steadily so you’ll _stay_ awake. You’re unsure if any of the sympathy originally comes from guilt, considering he was the one who coerced you into spending the night with him instead of in your Recuperacoon after you were finished putting your communicator’s casing together. That's probably WHY you had the nightmare, considering how deep you sleep when you're upset about shit, but it was hard to reject the offer. Your eyes hurt and you were tired and you were still emotionally sore from what happened with Gamzee; all Dave wanted was your company for awhile and _like fuck_ you were in any position to say no to warm, willing arms.

His comforting and cradling you back to normal turns into wandering hands really fast. Wandering hands turn into him turning you over onto your stomach (at first you’re confused and annoyed but _holy shit no_ it turns out to be _so okay_ ) and you fisting the sheets beneath you in both hands even faster.

He still kind of sucks at keeping things steady. He needs to stop a lot, pressed into you, chest heaving with hard, fast breaths against your back, arms shaking on either side of you and you hissing curses at him because he’s _in_ you and he’s _not moving_ and fuck him for picking you up by the fucking scruff and dangling you over the edge but not letting you go. At one point when he shudders to a stop again your impatience gets the better of you; you complain a little too loudly and his response is to finally growl “Jesus fuck _shut up_ ” at you between his teeth and for some reason him talking to you like that while you’re in this position is the hottest thing in the fucking world. So you do, you shut right the fuck up. All of the frustration melts into the mattress when he starts rhythmically digging into you again, anyway.

You transition so quickly from wanting to pitch him across the room to muffling the most pitiful noises that have ever come out of you into the pillow. You should be embarrassed but that’s not going to happen in the middle of something like this. There’s no room for it, not when he’s grabbing your hips and lifting you up a little more for better leverage and _yes_ , that’s a good position, that’s a _really_ good position and an even better angle because it hits all the right places and somehow he can get a little deeper and all reservations about being vulnerable on your stomach is kicked right the fuck off of the fucking meteor because it’s working for you and _that’s what matters_.

Afterward, once your tremors have subsided and his breathing against the back of your neck has considerably slowed, you’re left with this overwhelming fucking _burn_ that seems to reach every part of you from the inside out and it feels good, it feels _great_ , great enough for you to put the surliness aside for a little while and push Dave off of you and onto his back, engulfing his torso with your own body and limbs. He laughs drowsily and calls you a ‘fucking koala’, whatever the fuck a koala is, but you hiss a ‘shh’ at him and he stops talking.

Neither of you bother to clean up right now, and neither of you manage to fall asleep right away.

Instead, you talk. You fucking talk, like normal matesprits might, and while you’ve never had the fully realized experience of being in that quadrant before, it comes to you with unexpected ease. You haven’t discussed the quadrant thing with him. You’re admittedly a little wary to bring it up. At this point, though, you can’t really find a reason to feel anxious or rushed about it. You WILL bring it up. Eventually. You’re talking about other things right now, things that are safe and comfortable. You stray away from subjects like the end of the game, or the ominously unknown circumstances that you’re flying into. You don’t talk about Gamzee because there’s no point. You don’t talk about your nightmare.

You talk about stupid shit. Movies, books, what he wants to end up doing with music if things end ‘normally’, whatever the fuck normal even is anymore, what you used to want to do before everything went to shit. You keep it easy and uncomplicated. Your lives are complicated enough, you think.

When your conversation ebbs off and falls into quiet complacency, it doesn’t take too long for Dave to start snoring softly underneath you.

Self-reflection isn’t your strong suit despite how often you indulge in it, but it’s not so bad right now. You surprise yourself by thinking about Dave instead of the usual things that bother you and keep your brain moving too fast when you can’t sleep. The course of your relationship, whatever the word may pertain to in your unique circumstance, has been a pretty fucking turbulent one. You absolutely hated him at first. Then you grudgingly liked him. Then you hated him some more. Then you liked him again. Right now, you still kind of hate him sometimes because he’s a fucking moron, but you feel like maybe in a couple of ways, now, he’s your fucking moron. That makes the pill easier to swallow. It also makes you like him pretty permanently.

You know that you’re difficult to like. Your personality is off-putting to others. It’s a shitty defense mechanism, being hard and mean to everyone. You have soft spots and you expose them for the right people, though, and while your instincts have continuously suggested that it’s not a good idea, you find yourself glad that you tend to ignore them. Most of the time, it pays off. It’s validating to you and it ensures that you’re not fucking _alone_ all the time. It gives you people like Terezi and Kanaya. It gives you people like Jade and John and shit, even the Mayor. It gives you people like Dave.

You don’t know what’s going to happen when this trip is over. It could be anything between absolutely nothing to instant death for one or most or all of your fellow players. That is a wide fucking spectrum and there’s no way to tell where you’ll wind up landing in it. You DO know, though, as you reposition your head on Dave’s chest to find the slow, comforting thuds in his ribs with your ear, that you feel a hell of a lot better about hurling into the unknown because of the people you’re with. Everything else is dismissible, when it comes right down to it. Fuck everything else.

Just. 

Fuck everything else.


End file.
